Year of the Ute

I don't have much to say about today's game, what could I say? BYU put up a good fight, they made some big mistakes but I think Utah earned this win. There was no better place to be today than Rice Eccles Stadium. I am proud to be a Ute fan, I look forward to our BCS game in January, and...Go Utes!

Hoods - Rain Protection We Can Believe In

Today was a rainy day, not in the figurative sense but literally a day with heavy precipitation, and when the rains came down the umbrellas came up. Unfortunately the manners that are necessary for the proper handling of these bumbershoots were totally absent. I am one of those who prefers toughing it out with a good hood covering my head rather than bothering with the cumbersomeness of umbrellas, but today it seemed that I had to put up with their incommodiousness without actually reaping the protective benefits. While walking around campus I was already pushing my luck trying to avoid objects, people, and puddles in my path with my hood seriously limiting my peripheral vision. I did not think to worry about the potentially eye-poking, or even blinding, spokes or the streams shooting off the edges of other peoples' umbrellas, and apparently neither did they! After a day full of unfortunate umbrella encounters and full of hope for the change this new administration will bring, I plan to petition for ethical umbrella use laws, one of which will be an absolute ban on the spinning of said umbrellas while in use. At the very least I will push for umbrella wielding licenses which will only be issued to those who can prove they have a good sense of common courtesy and self-awareness. We hooded people hope we have found our candidate of change in President Obama and look forward to his umbrella reforms.

Democracy and Senior Citizens

Tuesday I had my first voting experience working as a poll-worker. It was not the efficient machine-like system of democratic expression I had expected but more of a slow-motion geriatric comedy of errors. Hearing aid problems here, senior moments of forgetfulness there, and the distinct scent of the elderly was everywhere. But for all that, the people in our precincts were lucky to have these old poll-workers, and I was lucky to have been put with this group. There are not many people with whom I could spend 15 straight hours but I thoroughly enjoyed almost every minute with them.

Our Poll Manager was Sue, she had been the chief nurse of a 400-bed mobile army hospital (four times the size of a MASH unit) in the National Guard for 20+ years and now works at the King's English bookstore. She was very calm throughout, making sure some of the more excitable old folks kept their cool and that we all had plenty of breaks. She even initiated a little pool, we all were betting on how many voters we'd have by the end of the day...sadly I took third.

Rex was our technician, a very very nice old Greek man. He has diabetes and so had toes and parts of both feet removed. Walking was not easy for him, but he was always quick to jump up whenever anyone was having trouble understanding how to work the voting machines. When he wasn't helping in that way he would sit by the doors on his big wooden stool, thank people for voting, and tell them about all the free Starbucks coffee, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and Ben and Jerry's ice cream they could get for voting. He would typically say 'Don't forget your free coffee, doughnuts, or ice cream.' This lead about half the people to turn around on the spot and say 'Where!?' Twice we had two people collide because the one in front turned around abruptly to look for the free food while the person immediately behind did not.

Rachel was our Provisional Judge, and the youngest worker....probably in her late 40s. She was given the nickname Deep Throat because she would get updates of election results on her phone and quietly relay them to us without letting the voters hear. (We were supposed to maintain complete political neutrality and not discuss politics in any way.)

Jeanne was the funny one in the group, a fifty-something year old English-major who came in wearing her daughters turquoise converse sneakers. She lead us all in a big cheer for each and every first-time voter who came in. She could always be counted on to know exactly how much time we had left...'six hours and 37 minutes!' When I was being too quiet she would say 'Alright Jennifer, let's turn the heat back on you...tell us why you're at BYU, or tell us about Philsophy.'

Anne was an almost-seventy year old English major with a fabulous vocabulary and a fiery competitiveness. She initiated a second contest, to see who could guess the time that we'd hit 500 voters. She beat me by 4 minutes and was tickled about it. At one point, when it was getting down to the wire, we had a man come in who had to vote on a provisional ballot. She was worried that I would count him in our tally and had he counted, I would have won, so she began saying 'He doesn't count, he's not in our books he's on provisional so his vote doesn't count!'. She made no attempt to keep her voice down and the man was looking concerned until Poll-Manager Sue went over to assure him that his vote would in-fact count.

Sue #2 was a 68 year-old originally from Montpeilier, Idaho who was sort of a math guru. When Poll-Manager Sue announced our original total numer of voters contest, Sue #2 spent almost an hour counting and calculating numbers to reach her guess. Unforunately her magical math did not give her the winning guess. Towards the end of the night as the number of voters dwindled to almost nothing, the rule of political neutrality went out the window. All of my left-leaning cowokers were letting Palin jokes fly and talking about moving to Canada or Mexico if the election didn't go their way. Sue #2 found all of this to be absolutely hilarious and would giggle to the point of tears. The sight of 68 year-old crying and shaking with laughter, on top of all the wittiness of the others made for lots of laughing all around.

Then there was Bill and Ruth, a married couple in their eighties, both with hearing aids, and seated on either side of me. Ruth graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music as an Organist and Bill is a former Physics professor at the University of Utah. Ruth was the grandma of the group, she brought homemade cookies, homegrown pear tomatoes, carrots, and nuts to sustain all of us. Bill is not a proponent of String Theory (the only physics topic I knew enough about to discuss with him) and does not understand things like music and sewing machines, he understands semi-conductors and likes them for their usefulness. Our only error in reconciling the books came when I took my ten minute afternoon break. When I got back and we checked our books against the machines we were off by one. Bill and Ruth started arguing about where the mistake was but eventually Ruth and I found the error and fixed it. Then she said, "You can't even leave us alone for ten minutes without everything getting messed up!" This gave me a completely exaggerated sense of importance.... like an indispensable cog in the machinery of democracy.

We had a good crew and at the end of our fifteen hour-day I was sorry to leave their company. But, they had stopped their almost intravenous intake of coffee and were all quickly losing steam so they each gave me a hug, I felt like I had gained eight new grandparents, and we all hurried home to watch the numbers come in. Senior citizens may not be the most efficient folks, but they take their title of 'citizen' seriously. It's not easy for an 80 year-old to work from 5:30am to 9:00pm, no matter how much coffee they've got. Things like hearing aids, canes, sight problems, unsteady hands, and even poor memories don't make it any easier. But their age group seems to be the one that answers the call of civic duty. This 'slow-motion geriatric comedy of errors' was what allowed approximately 643 people to vote, and probably millions more across the country.

Birthday Reflections

The best part of birthdays is being reminded of all the great people in your life. Today I am grateful for these people, but somehow I never seem to be able to express this, or at least not to the extent I would like. To put it more eloquently and philosophically, "Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small." (Emerson) Thanks everyone for making today a fabulous birthday.

Now here are some pictures from the the celebration of my two decades. (I am aware that 20 is not old, but being able to measure my age in decades makes me feel old. Not complaining though, I'm very happy to be officially out of the teenage years.)

Here are four of my five roommates out for dinner at CPK: Ainsley, Sally, Whitney, and Becky.

This is the fabulous hamburger cake made by Ainsley, enjoyed and admired by all. I wanted to have a giant hamburger that looked like a cake, but that wasn't really doable so Ainsley made this for me instead. The most important thing? It was delicious.


And here are some people who came to eat the cake






Thanks to all, apologies to those who were not included in the blog pictures. You are still appreciated.

BYU Top Ten

For quite some time now I've been working on a list of the top reasons I enjoy being at BYU. It wasn't easy, I thought about giving up at 3 but I finally found a way to get it done, plus two. So here it is, Top Twelve Reasons BYU Isn't Really Completely All That Bad!

#12 - When you write the name of your school, you only have to write three letters.

#11 - You don’t have to worry about your roommate asking you to leave so she can get some ‘alone time’ with her boyfriend, she only asks that you type a little quieter so she can read her scriptures.

#10 - You don’t have to deal with wasted college students being stupid/weird/inappropriate. You get to deal with a bunch of college students being stupid/weird/inappropriate because that’s just who they are, and no amount of coffee or sleep will solve these hangovers.

#9 - You say the word Hell and 90% of the students are either scared of you or label you as a sinner, or both. Why is this a good thing? You've immediately found the 10% of students who are potential friends.

#8 - Volunteering to say the prayer at the beginning of class is a good way to get out of saying anything else through the entire class. If you didn't read or do the homework, say the prayer!

#7 - Again with prayer...you know when you walk into the testing center praying that your test is easy, you've got at least ten other classmates praying for the same thing, thus the chances that the big guy is on your side increase ten-fold.

#6 - You've get nearly 13 million members of the church paying for part of your education through tithing.

#5 - It's really easy to find. Once you see the mountain with the big cement Y stuck in the middle of it, then keep walking until you find yourself in a strange land completely devoid of caffeine. If that doesn't work, don't stress, remember 'The World is Our Campus', it's impossible to escape no matter where you are.

#4 - Every football game day you get to be a resident of the international community known as 'Cougar Town'. You don't even need a passport!

#3 - You get to experience what earth life would have been like under Satan's plan. Once you’re in, your agency is out. It’s good I guess, they want you to leave BYU with a strengthened appreciation for Christ. Nothing will make you more grateful that Lucifer got the boot.

#2 – You find peace from the confusion and confrontation of politics because you suddenly understand that the Republicans will be the ones in power during the Millennium. Bar-Who O-What-ma?

And the number one reason BYU is just not that bad....

#1 - You get to witness, up close and personal, the despair that ensues on the day when residents of Cougar Town everywhere realize their team's 'quest for perfection' is over. Last Thursday was that day thanks to TCU, and it was sweet. It's a gift that just keeps on giving, we got to re-live it a little bit yesterday when the first BCS Standings came out and Utah was at #11, TCU at #14, and BYU....#21. That is why, if for no other reason, I like being at BYU.

There's No Place Like Home

We're a little over a month in to school down here Provo, so I don't think I can put off the back-to-school posts any longer. Turns out Provo isn't quite the awful center of the twisted zoobie universe I thought it was. Or maybe it is. If so, my apartment here has managed to remain a haven of sanity in the sea of self-righteousness. That is largely due to fabulous roommates, however a post about them will have to wait as I have yet to take any blog-worthy pictures of them. (Apparently post-shower towel shots are not eligible for blog posts) But for now, a short photo tour of the place itself will have to suffice...

This is the kitchen. Smallish, but the only real space problem we have had thus far is fitting all of our college-student-microwaveable-frozen foods in the freezer. Clearly our refrigerator was made before well-balanced frozen meals became numerous, cheap, and delicious. Or maybe this fridge was not made to hold a week's worth of meals for each of six girls.

This is the living room. We call the couch on the left 'the Whitney couch' because somehow she always seems to end up laying across it, always, while the rest of us make do with the other couch and the Love Sac. Other than that, the living room is the biggest reason we are grateful to be done with the dorms.This is our remote. Do you even have to ask why this picture was blog-worthy? This impossible-to-lose and completely sick remote was purchased by roommate Sally. She gets major props for this.

This is one side of my room. I thought about cleaning it up before snapping some blog pics but I decided it would be better to show it for what it is...and this is it 98% of the time.

The desk is clearly not functional space, neither is the floor as it is typically covered by various items, and so I use my bed as an all-purpose study and sleep surface. Unfortunately there is a fine line between studying and sleeping, I love Philosophy but sometimes it's a real snooze.

What is it about Fall that is so appealing? It would seem that Fall should be the most repulsive of seasons. After all, Fall is essentially a dying time. The vegetation, the fun, the free time, almost every aspect of the life that came in Spring, and peaked in Summer, withers and dies in the months of September, October, and November. So what is it? My theory is that by the end of Spring and Summer we are just ready to be done with the frolicking and the happy. I suppose I can only speak for myself, perhaps I am just a grump, but I am a realist. I am a person who likes to wear brown and black wherever possible. I am a person who likes, at times, to hole up in my room and avoid the sunshine and the people who seem to exude it. So, I like Fall because it brings people out of the clouds, they've got to get back inside and get back to work. I like the 'darker' seasons because the obnoxious springy and summery happiness is contained indoors and out of my face, by structure and schedules, work and weather. The Fall brings a different kind of happy, not loud and exuberant, but rather content and serene. Nature is on it's deathbed in Fall, and it is dying a calm, cool, and collected death.

Note: Picture taken by me last November in Central Park.