Blatant Obfuscation

I think I have come to a new level of disdain for meetings. Most meetings seem to be the product of the culture I have been raised in, yet over the last couple of weeks, I have come to a disdain or even a hate of meetings.
I serve as the Sunday School president of my student ward. I have an attitude its my calling, I will do what I can, but I can't add much more to a meeting than what is in my purview...about a month or so ago, the bishop asked me to attend an 8 am "ward council" meeting every week, instead of the twice a month it was.
I should note, I unlike others around me as well as family, have a strong grasp of time and the amount of time it takes to get things done. So long as I am only dealing with myself, time has no meaning, but if I am interfacing with people, I strive really really hard to be early by at least 5 minutes and then to get things done as soon as possible to not tie up other lives with useless waiting. I have yet to attend an 8 am meeting that started at 8 or close to it. [Introduction of an annoyance]
I attend a meeting that the agenda has nothing on it. [A second annoyance...meetings should have purpose beyond we need to meet to talk]. So for 30 minutes in ward council we sit around a table and people try to come up with something important to say, I have nothing to add, I normally attempt not to say anything. I tend to keep track of random statistics of the ongoings of the meeting to keep myself awake and entertained. [the average arrival for the meeting is 15 minutes after 8...in other words 5 minutes after the meeting gets started 10 minutes late].
I spoke up and asked that if the meeting was an 8:15 meeting than change it to 8:15 so I am not showing up at 750 and waiting for 30 minutes. It shows a lack of professional conduct.

I didn't go to church on Sunday. Due to circumstances I had a limited control over, I didn't sleep well the night before, when my alarm went off, I looked at the time and turned off the clock and went back to bed. I awoke around noon and felt like i hadn't missed a thing. I need to set the stage for a couple of things that happened. I got out of bed and dressed around 1230 after I got done reading. I ate a bowl of cereal and then took Jordan to work at 215 when he came out of his room. I came home and spent time between playing Mario Kart on the Wii and attempting to figure out what I was doing with the next 7 weeks of my life.
At 4, there was a knock at my door. There was the bishop and the 1st councilor wanting to talk. [Annoyance: people who show up and want to talk about nothing.] After some level of formalities I think I got a little to annoyed and started to show the entire annoyance to the visit that had not purpose. I end up getting a tad persnickety and asking the bishop what he wanted. It may or may not have had the desired effect I wanted. They left shortly there after, but this comes from weeks of the bishop showing up or calling just to talk about nothing. This past week, the 1st councilor was over just to visit about nothing.
I have been formulating a list in my head of why these visits to see me. I have come up with a couple of plausible scenarios. First, the bishop has it in mind that there might be a worthiness issue with me. I have evaluated my life, and can not determine that there is such an issue in my life. Secondly, the bishop is having thoughts on my calling as Sunday School President. This might be a likely thing to occur as I have been not wanting to teach a Temple Prep class if there is no one in mind to have the class taught to and it serves no purpose other than taking up time and resources. Lastly, it is closely associated with the idea of my calling, that the thought is in the bishops head I am in the wrong calling or shouldn't have a calling right now, which wouldn't hurt my feelings one bit. It wouldn't be the shortest time I spent in a calling.
I don't think I interact with family as much as the bishop is trying to interact with me on some issues. It is really odd to me.
Needless to say, I think if this continues, I might just stop going to meetings. Inactivity is looking pretty sweet to me.

~u

Posted by James at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

What I want

I have heard a lot of late about the what people want in life/relationships recently. I don’t think people realize how much I don’t really care about that, and if I did, I don’t want to discuss it.
What has thrown me for a loop, is a semantics argument on what people are looking for in their relationships. I was in some class here recently where we were having a relationship building and development discussion, the teacher steered the conversation to dating and asked what people looked for in a relationship, the answer that directed the course of the conversation was “The right guy for me’ given by a girl in the front of the room. The teacher than had a lesson on the articles ‘a’ and ‘the’, which ended up with that in relationships and social settings we look a lot for ‘the’ right person, crowd, place, or whatever and in reality we should be looking for ‘a’ right person, place, etc.
The philosophy there is that we will never be happy looking for a singular person that meets all the criteria, but that we can be happy looking for a particular type of person in a wide crowd of potential people, but also that our attitudes change from having to be perfect to working on individual problems that come up. In all it was a great lecture that I felt I learned a lot from and was able to apply to my life.
So back to the past week and the conversations about relationships, I spent the better part of a morning earlier this week, talking with a friend about the silliness in my mind over the list she had created for guys she would date. Particularly the qualifications she had listed. Of the qualities listed, I laughed at the notion that the guy had to be taller than her [qualified by at least 3 inches] and that he had to weigh more than her. My laughter at her list wasn’t surprising nor was the conversation we had [with me joking about most of the list].
I felt I learned something from the discussion though. Of her list the only thing she ended up deciding that wasn’t a bit trivial in the long term was holding a temple recommend. [She ended breaking up the list into categories]. After we got done talking about her list she asked about mine, which I promptly stated my usual two comments brunette and not from Utah, but after talking about trivial requirements with her, I quickly admitted that they were rather trivial.

In the time that has transpired since that discussion, and due to the fact that I have way too much time between moments where I have to be doing something, I have been working on a sheet of paper what my list would look like if I were to put down the qualifications for dating someone. I have a sheet of paper with a title on it taped to my wall, otherwise, I have come up with nothing. It occurred to me that I think in the end I want to be needed and need to be wanted.
I have wasted much time pursuing after things only to realize at some point in all of that I was doing nothing with no potential for returns. All I was doing was spending time and money so other would see the rewards of my efforts and this soured my opinion of people and social situations more. Over the past few months, I have had a shift in the mental paradigm of what I was will and what I was not willing to be a part of. Particularly it deals with those friends that don’t do anything but hang-out but at the same time are dating. I have gotten to the point of don’t include me with them.
I think what has gotten me more worked up than anything else is the lack of, or maybe even the inability to have control of what is mine. I do mean that in whatever terms possible. I cant seem to watch my TV without someone coming in and trying to railroad it and change what is being watched. I have given up trying to watch any of my black and white movies because once I do, the inevitable outcome is that my roommates have friends come over and no one according to them wants to watch a black and white. [Except me who started it, but that doesn’t matter.] So here I sit, and I am trying to figure out what I want and what I need in order to get things done.

I am looking at my goal of being graduated with a bachelors by the end of the Fall semester. It looks good, but at the same time, it could go haywire between now and then. Eighteen hours of course work to go and I should be done with my degree. I still have a lot to do between now and then, particularly I need to work towards taking the GRE.

I need to go back to work, not like I have a lot to accomplish, just need to focus on my task or two to do.

I guess I can sum this all up with I want to be needed and I need to be wanted

Posted by James at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I find that I write things down everyday, not a lot of them make onto the blog. This is more because I find that most of my thoughts end up being random and not really worth noting. But then again, some of the random thoughts are and here I will try to express as many of them as possible.

In late October, I spent most of the last week leading up to the exit poll worrying with weights. This isn’t that hard nor is it that difficult, but it was a long drawn out conversation that I didn’t understand. I spent several days on it, and even spent 5 hours of Election Day working on it. The end result was a little confusion on my part.

All of October I have been having some nagging feelings of things not done. I shrugged it off as part of the mound of homework I haven’t done in a month plus or the calling get to me, but recently I felt that something was off and I decided to investigate.
The feeling I get is that I need a change of venue for while. What does that mean? I more need to get the hell out of Utah for a while. Why? It’s more for my sanity than anything else. So I looked at my list of skill sets and decided that I was going to try to do something far far away. I was thinking Arabia. Its hot and desert-like and I am sure if there was ever a place not to be it would be there.
I note this because I think I am done with the college experience. I am not into it and I find excuses way to easily not to do homework or go to class or anything school related. Ever since Election Day has come and gone, I am ready to be done with this semester and school in general.

Recently I have come up been up to my head in ward-related business and the more I do things the less and less pleased I am with my service in the Church. I spend time and do things to fulfill my calling only to not have others follow thru or even care. I spend time trying to get people to come into interviews and what not, and they don’t even come.

In attempt to get a date with a particular female, I have decided that I am not currently pleased with the ‘dating scene’ here in BYU. In comes in three parts I feel.
First, asking someone out no matter how it is done is a personal thing, it deserves a response that is personal and direct. In my dating experiences, if the girl is going to turn you down, she has never done it over the phone, but rather has come talk to me personally. That was up until recently when for some reason that is an appropriate manner to do it here.
Secondly, I have worked under a philosophy that unless the girl has a diamond on her finger she is available, and even then there’s still a chance about it. None the less, the entire turn down because she seeing/dating this guy for about two weeks is a bunch of crap to me.
Lastly is the summation point here, are all females at BYU such cold-hearted she-devils[there has been some editing for the more sensitive readers]?

Last night, I picked up Nels from the airport and basically said we are taking a road trip to Colorado. Where does this come from, well I need to get the hell out of Utah, I need to clear my head, and I need to find something that doesn’t make me want to hit somebody in the face…
I’m going to Colorado…Wahoo…

Posted by James at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I should be working but I am not. I find it absolutely funny after all these years that the sheep explode in Warcraft. I enjoy playing it. I play it too much I know.

So I have a singular complaint. Every time emails come into my inbox, I am informed of it (okay so really it is checked every 10 minutes). But am I the only person that hates it when people are so rude as to Reply to All on huge mass emailing lists for offices. And today it has been a huge chain of emails all of which are have no purpose other than to complain about not having wireless internet access in our building.

If there ever were a cause to merit the going out and shooting people over senseless crap this would be one of them.

Posted by James at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It was a good plan, no it was a great plan. And somehow it failed...

The idea occurred to me a week ago, a friend was flying up today from Texas for some wedding somewhere, that wasnt really important to me. The important part was that he was coming to the Provo area while he was here and would be able to bring me something if I wanted. Well I thought about it and I desired a burrito from a restaurant known as Freebirds. (Okay so it was 2 burritos) So I went online, saw what they had to offer and then called another friend who frequented Freebirds to pick me up my order.

The entire plan was get the burritos last night, hand them over to the transporter, have him refrigerated them overnight, and then bring them with him on the plane from Austin to Salt Lake. I think the failure to retrieve them from the fridge is unacceptable. Now I have 2 burritos sitting in a fridge in Little River, Texas hundreds miles away from me.

At this point I think I can justify the homicide. The transporter was paid off in a burrito of his own (which BTW he called to tell how good it was) and neglected to bring me mine.

Live and learn I guess...what I am really wondering is the overnight option on getting the burritos here.

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Back in December I started to work on my brother’s basement, and finish out a portion of the area to be two bedrooms and also frame in the bathroom. It has been a project that he and I have worked on, off and on for the past 9 months or so.
We had "finished" one room in April so that I could have a room to myself. That is to say, the sheetrock work was done and paint went onto the walls to allow for my brothers office to be moved to the basement of the house out of the "boiler room" that became my room for the summer.
To make the space work well we decided to put the two bedroom doors on 45 degree angles into each room as to "maximize" space. Well the room that was finished the doorframe went in beautiful. It had caused no problem what so ever. It was the other doorframe that has been causing me grief and the main reason that the other room wasnt finished anywhere close the first. See, although everything says the frame is level and square, the door frame was off...big time, and so in hanging the door so that it closed correctly the doorframe looked utterly wrong. and then making the doorframe flush with the rest of the mesh made the door not shut right.

Last night, I spent 2 hours installing the door frame flush (I had put up sheetrock and therefore the doorframe had to comply). My brother and I then spent the time to try and make minor adjustments that had huge consequences in the hanging of the door. So after trying a could of different things we ended up doing the only thing we could see that would work. We took of the bump plate from the frame hung the door so it would close correctly and then put the bump plate up to make the door look closed.

The phrase that my mother had used growing up "A man on a galloping horse couldnt tell the difference so why should we" came to mind at that moment. It looks wrong, but since a man on a galloping horse wouldnt be able to notice the many many problems with the doorframe, why should I?
It isnt like my work standards are lowered, I am sick of that damn door. And that is what I am calling it, that damned door. I sit, there and curse it over and over and over again. I dont know how many times I have hung that door, it doesnt really matter. It is hung and it wont be changing.

I have to look forward to finishing the sheetrock work over the next couple of days (my sister in law wants the room finished before I go back to school). I should get it close...I think....

Posted by James at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This morning I slept in. It happens from time to time. Well needless to say, it probably would have been better if I had not slept it and gotten to work as early as possible. Well I did sleep in and now I am trying to get at least 4 hours of work in today, and it has become harder and harder.

First, the building I work in is a condemned building (literally) that is scheduled for demolization no latter than December 2006. It should have been gone years ago but was kept around to house various departments for BYU. Well, in an effort to consolidate where people are at (there are two wings no one is supposed to go into) they are doing work in the empty space across the hall to house some people who have been displaced due to changes in "usable" office space in some part of the building.
Okay so they are drilling through concrete and making a bunch of noise. No big deal, or so I thought. I put in my ear buds and was listening to music, this is where the second major snag of the day came it. My laptop stopped recognizing that it had a CD/DVD-rom in it and my CD was replaying the exact same track over and over again. I didnt feel like re-booting at the time, I had been making progress on a assignment I had been given, and re-booting would have taken time from the great progress I was making.
So I was using a single track on eternal repeat to drown out the noise of drill and construction work to get my actual work done.
Then a third snag hit: the server I am doing all my work on wasnt responding any more. Well it was but the server had no available memory to do what I needed it to do, therefore when trying to execute a build on a file it failed, and when trying to load the web-based app it timed-out.
So I am sitting here, contemplating walking out the door and going home for the evening, as nothing is working. I want to get 4 hours of working time in today but at the same time I am sick of the setbacks in the day. I wonder if tomorrow will be any better.
So after a few minutes, I rebooted my computer, which is a much easier said then done process, because in order to do it "right" and not mess with any of my files, I had to got through and close each file. And then I had to make sure each of my terminal windows to the server were disconnected correctly (I have been emailed about my numerous post failures at this).
So I get my computer rebooted. I get things reopened and now I cant connect to server. I feel it to be the final blow in the day. I am going home.
If it needs to be done I can be done tomorrow.

Posted by James at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You have no clue the desire I have to scream right now.

So I am 24, I started driving at 15, so that is 9+ years of driving experience (we wont include the various "borrowed" times before 15). Now I admit I have had a good share of accidents, and that in truth I have not always been the best driver out there, but hell, I know I can drive better than those I see around me.

I went out to lunch today, and in going to Carl's Jr to get lunch. It is not a hard drive. It is down two blocks maybe three from where I work. I have mellowed out over the past two years and so I was in no hurry to get there. Well coming down the street and crossing a busy intersection, a car coming from the other direction (late model Honda or Toyota) decides that it has to turn into a parking lot before I get through the intersection (I was almost through). Well the car turns in front of me and I hit the brakes coming within inches of the vehicle. Well the driver had to been scared out of her mind, because for the next 45 seconds she sat there, in the middle of the road. Finally as my patience had waned and I began to beat on the horn, she pulled into the parking lot letting me continue down the block to Carl's Jr.

Had I not developed this fascination with Guacamole burgers, I would have forgone the food altogether and just gone home. But I really like the burger.

So, my general question has become: Do they let any idiot and moron in Utah to get licenses? This hasn't been the first time that I have had a near accident (I tend to be able to "out drive" most situation now). They installed things known as "turn indicators" and I remember taking a form of "driver education" before being able to drive a car.

Just my two cents though...take it for what it worth...

Posted by James at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So yes I have read the entire book, the entire series and have seen all of the movie to this point. I didnt get into the books until after I got off my mission and had this month of nothingness to do and had to occupy my time with something. Well that something ended up being the first 4 books. I sat down and read the first one, kind of thought it was cutish, truly focused on a younger audience. (Book 1 took 6 hours to read cover to cover)

Well I read through Book2 and found myself liking it a little more, and then I read Book 3 and I truly saw some potential into the entire series. I mean I felt that this could go somewhere. Then I read Book 4. See I hadn't heard any of the books at that point in time, I had just begun to read them. So I was reading Book 4, and let me tell you I became disappointed. Well, I sat there I cursed. See about half way through book 4 my younger brother called to ruin the book for me, and as I finished the book I realized that the story was a cookie cutter creative writing assignment only elongated over books. Because in book 4 she starts to wind down the story to be finished by book 7, and let me tell you, I was not to pleased at that.

Well like the rest of the world practically, I waited on book 5, more for the pleasure of ruining the book for my younger brother like he had done for me for the 4th book. In an honest admission, I was offered an illegal PDF format of the book 2 days before the release of the book on newsstands, which I took. I read the entire book, and spent the next month trying to get my younger brother to talk to me on the phone (he knew my plans somehow).

So I decided that I would want to wait on book 6, because I had been disappointed at book 4 and book 5 didnt do much for me either (although I did ruin the book for a couple people). Well the 16th came and I was busy saying goodbyes to friends as I was leaving to return to Utah the next morning. I was having a good time with friends when we ended up stopping by Wal-Mart to pick up drinks and snacks for the rest of the night (we got there right at 8pm) Well my friend's girlfriend went straight for the Harry Potter books to get herself a copy. As she picked up a copy, I was like hell, I might as well have something to read on the plane.

Well, I started reading it before going to the airport and at the airport. Let me tell you I gave the time it took to read book 1, well book 6 was read cover to cover in 3.5 hours.

Now I am obligated to say, I think this book did a lot to raise my opinion of the series, but at the same time I hated the fact that I was more reading a diary of everybody's life more than being pulled into a story like i was with the first 3 books.

Oh well that is my rant on the damn HP series...

Posted by James at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)