Simply and Satirically Me

Long car rides do weird things to me. I’d rather be driving.  So when eight of the ten people in your family are piling into a 12-seater van for a 13 hour drive to Tennessee, it’s easy to decide that sleeping is the best option. Most trips go like this. Sleep. Eat. Read a book. Eat. Sleep. And normally I don’t think much about it. This time, however, I had a kind of a freaky inception moment. Yeah, the whole dream within a dream sort of thing. I’ve had them before—like those times I’ve repeatedly been “woken up” to get ready for school. But this was different because of how eerily real it all was and familiar it felt. First off, I’ve not slept a lot over the break. Book reading. Writing. Family. I had gone to bed too late and gotten up way too early to be trying to do anything but sleep. My brother was reading Mockingjay. I was talking about Divergent. We like talking about dystopian novels. Then, I’m telling them about the weird simulations in Divergent th...

So it’s finals week. Probably not the best time to be blogging out my thoughts, but let’s just say I’m not really in the studying mood right now. I’ll pay for it later. In a way, this blog is my release. It lets me get everything out of my mind that threatens to overwhelm me. I think too much. I’m slow of speech. But I can write. I love to write. So, when you have the sort of epiphany that I think I’ve been experiencing over the last month, it’s not something you just ignore. So...I'm releasing it. I live inside my own head most the time. Often it’s the case that I prefer observing to speaking, but that’s not socially conducive. Still, I generally only like talking to people who I feel close to. The reason? For better or worse, when I actually get to talking, it’s exactly what I’m thinking. I may not enunciate it correctly (I’m pretty horrible at that), but there’s no doubt that I’m going to be honest.   It’s like trusting someone with my inner self. Who I reall...

Just what does it mean to “Never Forget”? That is a question I ask myself a lot, particularly in times like today, where we are recalling our experiences of 11 years ago on September 11, 2001.  I could mean that I remember what I was doing. Sitting in class in 5 th grade in South Carolina. We were having a class discussion when someone walked into our classroom and whispered something into our teacher’s ear. Unlike most students, our teacher didn’t seem to think we needed to watch what was happening on tv. Instead, she started a discussion about life and hardship. I didn’t really know what in the world she was talking about. I remember coming home from school and my mom explaining that a plane had crashed into a large building, the world trade center. I remember she said it was hijacked, but that meant nothing to my limited, childhood vocabulary. All I understood was….there was a   huge plane crash.  I could tell you that I have never forgotten that m...

First day of classes for my seventh semester at BYU. I needed an easy 2 credit class. In fact, I was seriously searching to find the most laughable excuse of a college course I could find. A joke class. As I was laboring over the registration process, I recalled a conversation I had with a previous American Heritage Student. While we were in the Review Room, she had a number of papers on the table that didn’t look like they related to the course. So I asked her about them.                 “Oh, this is for my positive living class.”                 I think I laughed. “Positive living? What does that even mean?”                 She was surprisingly enthusiastic, “Oh, it’s really great actually. The class is supposed to help you learn how to handle all th...