Playing.

One of the perks to teaching a three-hour lab (humanities majors have trouble understanding this; I actually teach a diagnostic pathology LAB--like a science lab--not a TA session of a normal lecture class) is that I have three hours to do with as I please. I lecture for the first half hour or so, then let my students loose to shatter their confidence on whatever tricky histopathological specimens I have for them. As I help them hone their diagnostic skills--

--No; remember, a Leishmania amastigote is found inside what kind of white blood cell? A macrophage, that's right. THAT's an eosinophil. Yeah, I know it all just "looks like blood." Keep practicing and I promise you'll be able to tell them apart.

--I subject them to richly studded playlists of my musical choosing. I love music and I love forcing my taste on unsuspecting others. :-) Four semesters of teaching has taught me the best music for parasitology lab is ambient and people-friendly--something that can play in the background without seeming too out-there, but different enough that if somebody takes the time to really listen they'll make a comment. I start simple, then move into more and more eclectic stuff as my students get to know me. In all honesty, it takes almost as much time for me to prepare my playlists as it does my lectures. And it's way more fun.

Friday's (a work in progress)
Feist, La Meme Histoire
The Weepies, Gotta Have You
Sufjan Stevens, Casimir Pulaski Day
Jay Brannan, Both Hands
Andrew Bird, Scythian Empires
Jenny Lewis, Black Sand
Dar Williams, The One Who Knows
Belle and Sebastian, Mayfly
Kings of Convenience, The Build Up
Rilo Kiley, Pictures of Success
Conor Oberst, Cape Canaveral
Tristan Prettyman, All I Want Is You
She and Him, Thieves
Regina Spektor, Blue Lips
Bright Eyes, Easy/Lucky/Free

Doctor.

 original

This morning I received an extraordinarily, scientifically, fabulously official e-mail that starts

and I think I will keep it forever.

Dude.

This is an online chemistry teacher. I don't know his name, his age, or his story, but I spend all day with him. I know when he gets a haircut and when he has a cold. It's my current task (for this job) to watch, caption, organize, and take a screenshot of every single one of his (dozens upon dozens upon dozens of) chemistry teaching videos. If I ever see this dude in real life one of us has to drop dead, because there's no way we can exist in the same place at the same time. I mean, I know the contents of his entire closet.

Also, does anyone hate the dynamic of a class with adult students (older than the professor)?
Each of my history classes is blessed with one obnoxious old person (one, an at-least-forty-five-year-old woman who tries to dress like she fits in--tons of makeup, cutesy newsboy hats, sparkly scarves, the works--and another, a random fiftyish-year-old man). The man's okay, but the woman raises her hand all the time, creating awkward situations for our professor, who tries to listen to her comments with the respect due another adult's opinion (a problem in and of itself) while keeping her from overgeneralizing and vehemently asserting things that simply aren't true. Fact is, you're wrong, lady, and if you weren't old he'd shut you down. We're sick of hearing you blab on about things our relatively young professor has to back up and correct while trying his hardest not to offend you.

I'm having a huge phase with this song. Enjoy.

Awakening.

I grew up with words in my mouth; vocabulary and syntax blessed me early and I read fluently before I turned three. In my memory there is no time before, no conscious obscurity, no figuring things out, no working toward a goal. For me literacy just was, and so too was grammar and spelling. In kindergarten I sighed and lay down in frustration during Reading Circle time; the kind German woman in charge gave me a blank notebook and as other kids tripped over 'fought' and 'caught' I got to write stories. My first grade teacher was so amused by my six-year-old editorial rigidity that she put me in the high school spelling bee, where I competed against teenagers and held my own. And grammar! Grammar was not and never has been an issue of thought; for me it is instinct. I can feel grammar; from some deep and incomprehensible place I know why certain words go certain ways. I've always known, and not because I worked to gain that knowledge. It's because it is already there.

I was incurably unilingual until my second year of college; a stint in high school Spanish taught me nothing but "queso" and "pantalones" and I walked into my first Arabic class scared out of my mind. Over the past two years I've acquired structure, syntax, phonology, vocabulary, and the exciting beginnings of style. But more than anything else in Arabic, my favorite thing to learn is grammar. Because inexplicably--impossibly!--Arabic grammar is in me, too. It's there, and it lives in the same inscrutable soul-place where all the rules of English make their home. I'm beginning to feel case markings, relative clauses, volitional moods, relator pronouns, and intranslatable particles, and it doesn't feel like learning. It feels like awakening. I'm learning that true grammar is deeper than English; grammar is a mystic sense, a universal truth, nonspecific and yet masochistically so, the underlying thread on which every word in every language is strung together and lifted up into carefully shaped eloquence.

Augh.

is that fire, a sword, and scales? no wonder these people have a complex.

Three years of parking wherever the heck I want finally catches up with me. It's been a good run, folks. The "motorcycle parking" citation brings back particularly good memories.

[no emphasis added; apparently the gross overuse of bold, underline, and italic character styles lets me know these people mean business]

NOTICE OF PARKING AND DRIVING BAN FROM THE BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY CAMPUS

According to University traffic regulations, your parking and driving privileges on BYU property and road are revoked.

This permanently prohibits you from driving and/or parking any motor vehicle on the BYU campus at any time. Weekends, holidays, Sundays, etc...All are included in the parking ban. This also includes any BYU street or parking lot (see enclosed map).

All parking privileges are hereby suspended indefinitely.

All vehicles you are driving, parking, or in which you receive or have received BYU citations are banned from being parked or driven on BYU campus at any time.

Banned vehicles will be impounded and issued a $300 citation if found on campus.

Your traffic records may be forwarded to the Honor Code Office if you violate the ban.

Your ban is permanent and remains in effect unless the Parking Services Office notifies you otherwise in writing. Do not assume the ban will be automatically lifted at any time.

Sincerely,

Parking Services Manager

Dexter.

Me and this dude? We've got a lot in common.
I mean, obviously I'm not a serial-killing TV star. I'm careful to let spiders out of my house in one piece. But I've always thought I am a borderline sociopath. I never really got the whole "social" thing.

July 2008 (age 17)

Winter 2009 (age 18)

Winter 2009 (age 18)









Fall 2007 (age 16)

Winter 2009 (age 18)

April 2008 (age 18)

March 2008 (age 18)

Fall 2009 (age 19) (I won nearly $1000 for a personal narrative I started like this)

Winter 2009 (age 19)

Art.

Inspired by this blog, here is a dramatic representation of how I feel when I am called on in Arabic class:

Winter semester.

It's that time again!
I think I've religiously linked to this video twice a year ever since I was a freshman, but I don't think I've ever embedded it.

There's a first time for everything. Watch it; I can't be the only '90s kid who grew up on Animaniacs.

First Impressions:

Arabic 202 (Intermediate Arabic, semester 2): I love Arabic because it instills legitimate fear inside my heart. I know I like something scary much when my heart starts pounding and I get this feeling where I want nothing more than to throw things repeatedly against walls. I know what to expect from this class and I'm psyched to do the work (which I know will be all-consuming). There's nothing I find more fulfilling than mastering Arabic grammar (and I am one hundred percent serious). Oh, and my MWF conversation-lab (we have grammar lectures TTh) teacher is an 18-year-old Jordanian kid! That's going to be fun.
Edit: I just found out I ended up "third or fourth" overall in last semester's class! I can deal with that.

Hebrew 132 (First-Year Biblical Hebrew, semester 2): I love my laid-back professor and I love my classmates. This is the reason I get up in the morning (literally; it's at 8 AM). Plus, being a serious Arabic student affords me the luxury of being a seriously lazy Hebrew student, so if I just make a little time to study vocab it's an easy four-credit A. Oh, and remember that final I blitz-studied all through the night for last semester? Despite not being able to stay awake (my test is full of those omg-I'm-sleeping-there-goes-my-pencil-again marks), today I found out that I set the all-section high. Yay!

History 239 (Ancient Near Eastern History from 330 BC-610 AD): I can't decide what to think about this class. The material looks interesting, and I know some of my classmates, but it's hard for me to get a good hold on the professor. He seems nice, but he also seems like he has the potential to be a pedantic jerk. The syllabus is spread out into little bites of constant work (three exams and a final, three 3500-word essays, three response papers, and random quizzes), and I don't know how I feel about that. It's basically TA-graded, as our TA let slip during class (which also bugs me. Reasonable or not, since I am a senior-level TA I feel like I should be viewed as a TA all the time, so I hate having other TAs, especially if they have power). I'm tentative. We'll see.

History 241 (Middle Eastern History since 1800): This'll be fantastic, and I'm so glad I decided to take it (even though it doesn't count for anything). It's taught by my favorite professor, the material looks seriously fascinating, and I have a lot of friends to sit by. Best of all, there's a very open research paper assignment--choose your own topic, make it original, do your own research, and don't worry about annoying sequential-draft deadlines or peer reviews or anything. Just turn it in at the end of the semester and make it good. Really good. Now that's an assignment I can go for.

International/Area Studies 201R (Intro to Tibetan): This class makes me happy! I never thought I'd learn Tibetan. It's a tiny language class that meets just once a week for two hours, and it's taught by an older Tibetan man who's going to try his best to make us conversational. It does look to be a conversation-based class rather than a reading-and-writing one, but I hope there's a little of that thrown in as well (I just couldn't be satisfied if I didn't get to learn grammar!). We did get a handout of the beautiful alphabet (check it out!), so that's promising. And he promised that if we just come to class and participate, every one of us will get "a flying A!" :-)

Also, for your viewing pleasure, here is a comment about me by a friend who tried to recruit me to help coach a mock trial team (I would, but I'm so busy...augh...). I laughed. He nailed it.

Year in review.

"New Year's Eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights."

--Hamilton Wright Mabie

"For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

And to make an end is to make a beginning."

--T.S. Eliot

"A happy New Year! Grant that I

May bring no tear to any eye

When this New Year in time shall end

Let it be said I've played the friend,

Have lived and loved and labored here,

And made of it a happy year."

--Edgar Guest

2010 began with a New Years' Eve dinner party that ended with my friends passed out on couches and me cleaning the house by myself at 4 AM. (For some reason we've never really scored with New Years' plans.) :-)

I hosted Amanda's huge masquerade-themed birthday party and learned about the staples of college life (Macs and Snuggies) with the now-ex-roommates I still adore.

I entered the world of amateur adult figure skating thanks to two inspiring Olympic performances by Johnny Weir and snagged eight stitches in my chin after a shaky one-foot glide turned into a bloody mess.

I applied to biomedical research programs all around the country and was accepted as a (well-paid!) summer intern at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. When I got my acceptance e-mail (during a particularly boring honors program lecture) I was so excited I gasped out loud and squealed to everybody around me.

 I signed my first sublease agreement with a girl I found on Craigslist and flew myself all the way across the country to spend the summer doing stem cell research for Children's Hospital in Boston.

I met lots of friends in Boston and (for the first time) really enjoyed the singles-ward experience. Exploring the city on my own, bit by bit, gave me confidence and honed my itinerary-planning skills. I researched all the best restaurants and destination sites and really took advantage of my time.

I presented the real, important, original research I had worked on all summer in front of some of the world's best stem cell researchers at a Harvard conference. I painstakingly designed that poster all by myself, and I personally produced every piece of data on it (including the statistical analyses, all of which I did by hand). I'd never spoken in such an intimidating setting, and my presentation didn't go very well. Accepting that fact was a learning experience.

 

I finally made it to New York City and Washington, DC, both of which I loved visiting.

 I started fall semester by moving into a new apartment and meeting the new roommates I now adore. I worked two jobs (web design at Independent Study and semester 3 as Medical Parasitology TA), changed my major from microbiology to linguistics, learned to despise organic chemistry, and made the decision to apply to medical school in 2011...but for the very first time, after much soul searching, I opened my eyes to the possibility that a career in medicine was not my only option. What I loved more than anything was learning Arabic, so I decided that I will attend grad school for Arabic or for linguistics and pursue a career in academia. I dropped my chemistry minor and added one in Ancient Near Eastern Studies.

 I made the decision to serve a mission (I'll put in my papers this May).

We celebrated our first F-ship wedding.

 I got my very first non-straight-A (a B!) and for the first time in my life, my GPA is not a 4.00
(it's a 3.97).

For the first time since 2005, I did not leave the country.

And I closed out the year in the company of some of my very best friends.

2010 was crazier than I ever could have imagined. My goals and my future have changed so much (and, hey, I guess I have too).

Here's my in-summation song for this year. The last stanza's what I'm looking at (it begins at 2:15).

Here's to 2011.

test pic

So let it be written...

...so let it be done.

There it is, in all its glory.

My very first non-straight-A.

In fact, it's a real live B. 

And it's mine, really mine.

I can't decide whether to celebrate or cry.

oh, wait.

maybe I can.

:-D

thanks to kelsey for two of the photos. and y'all are right, the costumed one's not from this year, but we haven't changed so it might as well be.

Aww.

found while combing the far reaches of the Internet while my dad makes hot potato soup in our new Blendtec, my brothers engage in a fierce Ping Pong tournament, my mom settles in for her fifth hour of a Lord of the Rings marathon, and my little sisters build princesses out of Tinkertoys.