Hello, Craig

I know, I know. Blogs are an easy way to keep up on someone's life without having to go through that hassle of calling them and holding a conversation, ugh, so tired. So it's great when people have blogs! Especially people you're secretly stalking! And incredibly frustrating when they constantly withhold the juicy details.

Want some juicy details?

I have a 9 - 5 job, people. 8 - 4:30, really, but it's in that 9 - 5 category. Sometimes interesting things happen on my job, like that time I left a voicemail for someone named Harry Dickey (no joke, I even wrote it down in my notebook to remember always), and because I am a twelve-year-old, I had to text my friend Dan to let him know. It's nice to have friends like that, especially when they return the favor. Also, there are three young men whom I work in close proximity with that I have nicknamed Sketch, Creeps, and Yikes. I'll probably be telling many, many stories about them in the near & upcoming future until they are fired for crimes against humanity and general shiveriness. Dickens wrote about these guys a hundred and some years ago. They are that level of amazing, and obviously not in a good way.

Beyond that, my job is not exciting. No juiciness there.

When I come home from work, I make dinner. After dinner, I read my scriptures, work out, clean up, go for a four-mile run, come back, and start thumbing through whatever philosophical text I'm combing through that evening. Right now it's Aristotle's Politics. I want to know, really understand, if a country actually needs a military to be prosperous. And why. And what is prosperity, anyway.

That is what I do. I go to bed before midnight. I bake (incredibly delicious) muffins for potlucks. I give talks in church.

Oh, and I field phone calls from some of the most interesting, entertaining people on this planet, barring Stephen Colbert himself. And given that only one person ever calls me regularly (maybe one and a half), I guess he gets all the credit for that himself. It's your choice, people: Share in the wealth, or silently lurk my blog.





P.S. If you actually, sincerely believed that what I outlined is really all I do, then you don't know me very well.

Don't Throw Rocks

I didn't like Juno. There, I said it. I will accept all of your contempt and derision, and then I will tell you why you are wrong.

Click Here

I got the weirdest (maybe-)compliment today. Trina saw me sitting at my desk and came by to ask me if I'd been a dancer at one point in my life (as in a ballerina, I see where your mind is going, and I'm going to nip that right in the bud). Well, yes. I was once a ballerina. Until I was eight.

But apparently when I cross my legs, I point my foot like I've had lifelong training. Go me? At least when I'm sitting down I can manage to be graceful. Also when I'm directing minions, but that's a different sort of grace entirely.

Science Lesson

I realize that I shouldn't make fun of her or expose her to embarrassment because she gave me life, blah blah blah, whatever. She had children and raised them in the internet age, she had to expect that something of this sort would happen eventually. So here is what happened in a conversation between my mother and I today.

(First, some backstory. A couple weeks ago we went to the National Art Gallery, and while we were shopping around in the gift store, she came upon a little solar-powered contraption that attached to a window and had a prism dangling from it, so when the sunlight came in, it would turn some internal gears, spinning the prism around, and making rainbows dance all over the room. That device stopped working today, and I could hear little gears trying fruitlessly to turn, so I decided to perform some microsurgery on it and get it working again, to soothe my mother's heartbreak over a lack of spinney rainbows.)

Me (as I'm holding the contraption up to the window, trying to catch some light to see if my work had any effect): No, there's not enough light coming in, I can't tell.

Mom: Do you want me to get a flashlight?

Me: I'm sorry, what?!

Mom: A flashlight.

Me: No. How would a flashlight do me any good?

Mom: Well, I figure light is light.

Me: ...No, Mom. Solar power requires a Sun.

Mom: Are you sure?

Me: Yes.


See, the thing about a flashlight vs. sunlight, is that your standard flashlight is about 3 watts (I googled it), while "the power at noon on the equator is about 1 kW per square meter," leaving room for all sorts of variables to enter in and mess with that figure (I maybe googled that as well, don't judge me). So, while light MAY be light, you know, photons bouncing around, making physicists scratch their heads, because (and they will admit this to you when REALLY pressed) they have NO IDEA what is going on with those little buggers - light may be light, but 3 watts vs. 1,000, or even 500 is kinda a huge difference.

And now you know.

An Update On Work, My Way

Today at work we tried signing into the system with our brand new IDs and passwords, which of course failed miserably, so our trainer was on the phone with IT for a good hour or so. Which left us free to mill about and talk amongst ourselves - !!! I got paid to sit around and chat. This is truly an amazing country.

So of course we spent a good portion of our time coming up with creative ways to kill each other, and in the interest of full disclosure, I probably have the market cornered in original, grisly demises.

Like anyone here is surprised.

I also met some of my soon-to-be team members and introduced myself, and then went skipping (literally) across the production floor, certainly not drawing any attention to myself in my pink, butterfly'd clothing. Basically I own the place already.

Driven

I will just put it out there like this: I really like conversations with people who make me feel like an imbecile. I don't enjoy them, that's not what I said; I like them. Because they are important. And I wish I could have three of them every day.

Because what happens when someone makes me realize, geez, I know so little about x, y, and z, I can't even express a coherent thought concerning the matter, let ALONE an interesting one, is I make darn sure that doesn't happen again. I start reading, hunting, fishing around in my mind, sorting my feelings out, getting the facts straight, and coming to some sort of conclusion. Even if it's just about a pudding flavor, I do the research. The shame is that I usually never have another conversation with that person on that subject x, y, and z, so they never see how much I have learned, and so my pride is never assuaged on that matter. They will probably go for the rest of their lives thinking, Boy, she knew so very, very little. And I HATE that. I want to be considered smart, capable, and well-informed by my peers, because guess what, the whimsical draw of having a favorite color of Bank lollipop, it only goes so far. When I am thirty-seven, people are not going to accept that from me anymore. I'd better be prepared.

It had never occurred to me, really, before tonight, that there is something wrong in having a huge, clumpy group of Big Ideas that are so broad in scope that nothing can be made of them. It's something that you'd better believe I am fixing starting right now, though.

I don't know how anyone has time for baseball games and friends.