Yep, it's true. I will be marrying Chelsea Lane Campbell on January 7th, 2010.
I will probably post some wedding stuff here, but go here for all the info, including an introduction to both of us, FAQ's, and a blog.
Be sure to sign the guest book, post comments, and check back there for updates, pics, and videos.
I love you, Chelsea.
So, I came to grips with this whole blogging thing when I realized that as long as I was trying to make it worth the few minutes friends and family spend here I was okay. I remembered through the comments that I am in charge of what I put on here, and that maybe I should just lighten up a little. Of course, school started today and I didn't write on this thing while I was on a break.
In the latest Twitter news, Michael Beasley was checked into rehab after taking a picture of his new back tattoo while forgetting to take the weed of the counter, and then posting suicidal thoughts on Twitter. I don't think it is a great idea for someone that high profile to have a Twitter or Facebook, because something like this is bound to happen sooner or later. It seems that fines in the big three sports have tripled since Twitter came about, and that all these athletes seem to think they are now on reality TV, but I am debating here whether Twitter actually helped Beasley in this case. Who knows what would have happened with the drugs as far as the league is concerned, but thanks to his very public thoughts on suicide he is now in a rehab clinic.
So there you go.
So, nobody really blogs anymore, which leads to nobody commenting (no comments on this entire page), which leads again to no one blogging because nobody is reading them. I blame Twitter for all of this. Everyone is now getting their thoughts out too quickly, and there is nothing to write a more than 160 character message. I was on Twitter for like a week, but I'm sorry, I have a hard time not getting angry when someone thinks that where they are eating lunch is interesting information, or that I want to know how many hours of sleep they got, or that they aren't doing anything (but should be). At least with blogs the narcissism built up enough to hopefully create an interesting human experience when it was typed out.
I have often wondered if having a blog is a good thing for someone who likes to write. Sometimes energy that could be used for writing in my notebook is spent here instead, and maybe sometimes those thoughts and ideas should ferment before being shared. Not that it wouldn't be alright to use ideas in a story that have been blogged about before, but you would just be re-hashing old ideas, and I have noticed that when I write about something and it is read, those ideas leave my brain and no longer evolve. Maybe they should just be kept inside until the right time. After seeing the world of Twitter, I am seeing more clearly the merit of someone who doesn't say anything unless it's worth saying.
I was actually planning on this being a June and July recap, but I think I talked myself out of it.
This is going to be lame. I only have a few minutes.
I am back in school, but don’t really feel like talking about it. I can sum it up with two words: Broken Air-Conditioning.
You know what bothers me? The phrase “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that.” Like when you tell people something about yourself and they say, “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that.” I hate when people say this to me. I KNOW there is nothing wrong with it, that is why I am that way, or am doing whatever it is I am telling you about. When you say there is nothing wrong with it, you are implying that I need to be reassured that there is nothing wrong with it because there are plenty of people out there who think that there is something wrong with it, and really, most likely, you do think that there is something wrong with it, but are showing that you are an accepting person and don’t judge, so even though there is something wrong with it, you are still okay with it, but when you say that, you are doing the opposite, it seems to me. *Breath* Anyway, it’s annoying.
It it it.
Retro-quote: After the war, I was dateless again. That Viet Cong girl dumped me.
– Mr. Belding, Saved by the Bell
I thought this was pretty interesting. Gas Saving Prius? vs. BMW M3. Not what you drive necessarily, but how you drive.
Do you ever have those nights where you lay in bed and you think about one time in your life? Just one. You think about what it means, and what you can or did learn from it? Maybe you didn’t learn anything from it; it just feels like you should have?
I was lying in the room I spent a good deal of growing up in the other night, and I don’t know where it came from, but I had a flashback to a night when I was sixteen. I was in my parent’s basement with a girl I knew from work named Annie. I had never had a girlfriend up to this point and I was really hoping that was going to happen with Annie.
You know Charlie in High Fidelity? Annie was kind of like my Charlie: the kind of girl I thought I wanted to meet (which, honestly, meant to a sixteen year old me that she was hot), and “she liked me, she liked me, she liked me…at least I think she did,” and in hindsight I can see that she was awful. If I had never heard that she thought I was cute, I would have never attempted to humiliate myself, by trying to go out with her, but, as it goes, she did think I was cute, and I did hear about it.
We started hanging out. We spent most of our time with her friends who were like her and were mostly rich preppies, dumb jocks, and cheerleaders. They listened to Limp Bizkit, and Kottenmouth Kings, and drove $60,000 cars their parents bought for them. I had nothing in common with them, and I hated hanging out with them. Eventually, I got her and a couple of her friends to come hang out with my friends. That didn’t quite work, either. Just about everyone in my life could see the kind people they were except me. The one time we hung out with my friends it ended with Annie’s friend, Jessica, crying, and her other friend yelling insults at everyone, and an awkward twenty minutes of me driving them home early.
Despite everyone asking me why I was hanging out with her, I plugged on hoping it would all be okay soon. I never did kiss her, though. I wussed out every night I hung out with her, which was probably my subconscious holding me back more than it was being a wimp. On the last night we hung out I walked her to her car and we just stood there having that awkward moment before a first kiss. I chickened out again and she got in her car. I finally got the balls and asked her to get out of her car for a second, which she wouldn’t do. She said we could do it later. Embarrassed, I said, “Okay, well, I am going to go inside and hang myself now.”
She told all her friends about me trying to get her out of the car, which led to me getting made fun of all day at work. I was too embarrassed to keep trying.
Anyway, the night I was thinking about was when the two of us were laying down in my room. Something was in the air, something heavy, and it could have been romance for all I knew, but I started spouting out some feelings. They had to do with fear mostly, I mean I was sixteen, seventeen, and soon high school would be over and I was getting on in years. I was afraid of the future and that was what I was telling her, and she had no idea what I was talking about. She didn’t understand how someone could be afraid. I didn’t know how to explain fear to her, and I felt a little silly, but mostly I felt confused. How could someone that age not feel at least a little fear? I began to realize that she was not really in touch with reality. Maybe she was too sheltered, or was ignoring it, but I felt kind of sorry for her. At least I knew what fear felt like. At least I knew it was something to be felt, and was real. And I know now that that particular fear has been conquered, and I know how much I have learned while doing it. I know now that since I have moved on to much bigger and scarier fears in my life, that it is necessary, and that I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I wasn’t afraid of certain things. I know that if you are unable to feel fear then you probably aren’t able to feel a lot of the other things life is.
And life is a lot of things.
She got married about three years later. Her husband was an ex-boyfriend of hers at the time I was attempting to date her. I met him a couple of times and they are a match. I wonder how you can get married without a concept of what it is like to be afraid? Of course, now that I write that it seems like a lack of fear would make it pretty easy, and maybe that is better. But maybe it is like the back-up quarter-back syndrome where the first-string guy goes down and the back-up QB does an incredible job for the first few weeks because he doesn’t know how hard it is supposed to be…but it does eventually catch up to him.
I guess what I can get out of that night is that I am glad I am a person who feels. I am glad I have had ups and downs and know that I always will, that at times I will be afraid, but, at others, so happy I could pee. I am glad I don’t blissfully float through a naive life waiting for the human experience to catch up to me.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/05/15/iraq.oldest.soldier.dies/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
"A Vietnam War veteran killed in an Iraq roadside bombing this week has become the oldest American service member to be killed in both Iraq and Afghan combat, the Pentagon has confirmed."
I mean, you'd think after he died the first time he would have gone the hell home.
It has been a while. I have been trying to finish up the semester by writing two papers that were kicking my butt. I turned them in on Friday and then was out of town over the weekend.
I don’t really have an April summary other than: Waiting for Godot, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Pedro Páramo, The God of Small Things. Those were the books I was writing my papers on. If you want to read a great contemporary novel, read The God of Small Things, by Arundahti Roy. I think it is amazing. It was the last book we read in my global lit class. It was our reward for getting through the semester. I am no good at doing reviews, so, if you can, just trust me. I think Reena Jana from Salon.com said it best when she said Arundahti Roy is “butt-kicking good.” If you are into literature, read it. If you are the kind of person who doesn’t take suggestions just because they aren't your suggestions, then, if we see each other or you post a comment here, you don’t have to admit to hearing about it through me. You can lie and rub it in my face and say you were way ahead of me, and that you read it ten years ago if you want. I don’t care. Just read it.
I can’t think of anything else to say. School starts again a week from today. I think my brain really is taking this week off.
My Newest Book I Have to Wait Two Years to Read
A Devil on One Shoulder and an Angel on the Other: The Story of Shannon Hoon and Blind Melon
. . .so it is time for another play by play post.
4:29 – Decide to write this post.
4:30 – Debate with myself if I should mention things like “Took a drink of water.” Still not sure, but, either way, I just took a drink of water.
4:31 – Received this IM from Cam explaining why we couldn’t IM each other this afternoon: I begged Bill to sabotage the system. So to play a joke on me he shut down my internet, that's what was wrong
4:35 – T.O. to Buffalo? Haha, that is going to be awesome to watch.
4:37 – This was earlier, but is noteworthy. I got this in one of the reports I was working on today: The insured was there, they let out the dog, the dog wents nuts, they got upset with me, and asked me to leave. Therefore I did not do a interview.
4:56 – You know what really bothers me? Lists that give you five or ten tips on something that is difficult. The idea behind these lists are good, but they hardly ever have any tips that actually help. Take this one I have in front of me that is Five Tips for Job Hunting during a Recession. The first tip is “Stay Positive.” Really? That is your number one? Number five is “Be Persistent.” So I shouldn’t give up? EVERYONE ALREADY KNOWS THESE THINGS! It is like reading a dating tips list, and it tells you to “Be Nice.” Oh, okay. So, I should NOT headbutt them in the nose, tell them they are ugly and have an unpleasant smell, and then ask for a second date? Hmm, thank goodness they are getting the word out.
You don’t have any programs or websites or. . .SOMETHING that the lay person might not already know simply by the fact that they are alive? By the look of these shoddy lists, you need just as much help as the rest of us, but apparently writing shat that everyone already knows is recession proof.
5:06 – Calming down.
5:12 – Came home from my mission five years ago today. . .wow.
5:49 – Just asked my friend, Lacey, how Spain was, but she is in the Philippines. Whoops.
5:54 – Off to Harmons.
6:17 – Back. Some old Pennywise came on my ipod and I thought about when I went to California with my buddy Clay when I was fourteen. I could talk about this trip for a very long time, but I want to save it for later.
7:32 - Shuttin it down.
“What is with the stop in the “stop, drop, and roll” bit? When I catch fire, the last thing I’m going to be doing is stopping.”
“Good point.”
“I tell you what, I am going to go ahead and skip the stop part, and just go straight to roll. Drop and roll, man. Or really, just roll. I mean, if you are going to roll, isn’t the dropping implied? You have to drop to roll, and I believe everyone can do the drop math when needing a roll. It’s a good thing we’ve never caught on fire before this.”
“It seems like I heard someone else talking about that the other day.”
“Probably."
“Did you watch Flight of the Conchords?”
“No, I don’t like it.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, it’s not like I don’t like it, I guess, or would like it, rather, but I just get so sick of listening to everybody talk about it that it makes me angry. Yes yes, you like it, everyone likes it, now shut-up about it.”
“You would like it.”
“Probably.”
“Well, I haven’t watched the new one yet, you should come over and see it. I know you’ll like it.”
“No.”
“Why do you not like stuff on the count of other people liking it?”
“It’s not that. It’s the fact that I could probably quote the entire series and I have never even seen an episode. I liked Napoleon Dynamite and Borat when we first saw them, but then all I heard for the next six months were awful impressions everywhere I went. There is a girl at my work who can’t even talk normal now because all she did was do Napoleon Dynamite impressions for a year, and now her voice is stuck, like how you weren’t supposed to make ugly faces when you were little because they would eventually just set.”
“Well, you’re missing out.”
“I’m sure I am. You know what I want to do? I want to find a good barber.”
“A barber?”
“Yeah. Go in, get a cut and a shave, and then he takes the razor to the back of the neck and gives you that powder stuff. I have only been to a barber once, and it was awesome.”
“Hey, that kid kind of looks like that Diggable Dave guy?”
“Who?”
“That guy. Right there.”
“Oh. I never met Diggable Dave.”
“You don’t remember Diggable Dave?”
“I remember him, I just never met him. That was before I got home.”
“When Rob and I first got home, we went to his house to play Ping-Pong. I was pretty confident going in, but then I noticed he had to change into his Ping-Pong shoes; I then refused to play.”
He couldn't think on cloudy days. His thoughts needed room and the clouds smothered them. They needed to at least reach the sky; he didn't know where the sky began, but he was sure it was somewhere above those clouds.
The man turned around, walked home, and thought small.
I was walking to class and went to enter the doors to the OSH building. They were glass doors and there was an older couple next to them with their backs to me.
As I went to open the doors I found they were locked, and at that moment the couple started walking away. The guy turned around, and I was hoping he was going to open the door for me with a very simple push. He stopped, we made eye contact, and then he kept on walking.
This year was—good. The reason I pause before my good declaration is because this was a year of extremes. “Aren’t they all?” Well, no, not really, at least at this stage in my life. It is a weird time; it’s a time that you can’t really understand unless you are in it or have gone through it. “Yeah, one of those things we all go through.” Umm, not at all actually, especially in this culture, it seems like the majority of people don’t go through this.
We were frightened of being left alone for the rest of our lives. Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being left alone for the rest of their lives at twenty-six; we were of that disposition. - Rob, High Fidelity
The mid-twenties in the Mormon culture are freaking weird. All my best friends, save one, are married and have been for quite some time. Watching each one get married sucked. I am sure I have never said that to them before, but their weddings sucked. I don’t mean that they weren’t wonderful and beautiful and that I wasn’t happy for them, but seeing a best friend get married while all you can do is stand there and watch everything change, except yourself, is a bit depressing. As I watched each one get married I knew that that would not be me for a very long time. I wasn’t ready to be married, nor did I want to be, and you would think that knowing that about yourself would be comforting. It’s not. All knowing that does for me is confirm that I have been left behind, and no matter how many times someone tries to make me feel better by saying people move at different speeds, and that timing is different for everyone, it will always just make me feel worse. It just conveys to me that I am slow, and somewhere along the line my progress has been retarded.
I’m not moping, I am just trying to explain why this time in my life is weird. Hmm. . . I was going to say that one reason it is weird is because in the rest of the country not being married at 26 would not be weird at all. I was going to say that I am in a rare circumstance where not being married by now causes all sorts of anxiety and pressure, mostly applied by other people, but I just read an article in USA Today that said the average age to be married in the U.S. is 26 for women and 27 for men. I thought it was more like 31 or something like that, so maybe it’s not as weird as I thought, but I still maintain that not being married by now in most circumstances would not cause as much of the aforementioned anxiety and pressure. Also, I would think that the average age for a female Mormon to get married is much much lower, which always brings the thought that if I go on like this for a few more years I may be looking at either insta-family or marrying a ninteen year old, and nineteen year olds bug the bejeebus out of me.
Anyway, I could go on and on about this subject, and maybe I should so all of you who got married at twenty-two get a better feel for what it is like and stop asking all of us late-bloomers what is wrong with us every time a relationship fails, or whenever we don’t want to go on a second date, but I won’t, because I need to get on with the post because I am forgetting what the point to this was supposed to be.
Oh yeah, year of extremes. Since all my friends have been married, and good times are fewer and further between, there haven’t been as many peaks and valleys in my life. I have felt more like I have been flat-lining somewhere in the middle of the Rockies and Appalachians. It hasn’t been all bad, sometimes the line was cruising along higher than others, but there were just no really great times or really bad times, and it didn’t really feel like living. This past year, however, started with a gigantic spike downward on my twenty-fifth birthday. A relationship failed that day and sped toward rock bottom at terminal velocity (remember that Charlie Sheen movie?). The reason this particular dumping was so difficult was because along with the end of the relationship came loads and loads of embarrassment. Embarrassment because of why it ended, and because so many people in my life and her life thought we were making a mistake; we assured them we weren’t and kept on going. Well, turns out we were and I proved everyone right and felt like an idiot. Of course, in hindsight what I did wasn’t really embarrassing, I was just coming to a realization, and it was actually great. Bloody wonderful, really. At the time, though, I would have none of that positive talk, or any talk really. I locked myself up in my room. I didn’t return phone calls, texts, emails; all I did was listen to ESPN radio because it was the only thing that didn’t really make me feel.
Even after I bounced my ceiling wasn’t very high at all. I just kind of vibrated between rock bottom and ceiling for a couple months. I started talking, but not about anything important. I started listening to music, but only a few certain songs by a few certain artists. Eventually, much to my chagrin at the time, I had a breakthrough. I was driving down 27th South listening to Avail when I first felt entirely okay. The song was Simple Song. It was as perfect for me at that time as it could be without actually writing it myself. I realized I was still capable of feeling good, and that kicked me out of my funk. That was a good day.
The first day of school was today (13th). While not the best way I can think of spending my birthday, it is pretty fitting. I moved around a bit the past year and a half or so, and haven’t been in school because I didn’t know exactly where I was going to be. Then I had some trouble getting going at the U, and missed another semester. This past summer, I finally got back in school, and it's good to be back. I started my third semester at the University of Utah on my twenty-sixth birthday, and it is a reminder that I am not where I was a year ago, and, in this case, that is a comforting thought.
There were a couple of funerals in the family this year, both coming much sooner than they should have, but the actual services get counted among my high points of 2008. They were both very life assuring and uplifting, and made me think about the quality of my own life and how I am responsible for it being good or bad, there is no fault to be slung around if it is bad, and I thought about the impact it had on others when it was good. I count those two days as good days.
After the funeral of Grant, my father’s cousin, I went to lunch with my family. With the exception of my sister’s baby boy (and the restaurant employees who swarmed around my nephew) it was just a meal with my immediate family, something that I don’t think has happened since I was in fifth grade. Outside of what it was, it wasn’t particularly special; we talked about football, about my brother’s new job, and my family found out I like sushi. It was lunch at a place called Crazy Jim’s, and it was special to me.
I want a family of my own someday. I do. I think 2008 really helped solidify that desire; I don’t want it right now, per se; I want to do a good job, but that is something I am moving towards. I heard about an online service the other day called Ashley Madison. It is a dating service that is supposed help married people cheat on their spouse anonymously. I guess in the seven years it has existed none of their customers have been caught, and there have even been marriages that have come as a result of it; the ass said that as if there were no irony in that statement. I hear about things like this and I think of my own family and how sacred all those relationships are to me and how every time we all get together for a birthday or a holiday I am reminded and at how full life can be, being single sometimes I can forget. I’ll never forget how dark I felt while listening to that interview, or how sad I was that so many people are eager to screw with their families while saying that they are doing it for “the sake of the marriage,” or that Darwin made them do it. I will always remember, though, how it made me so sure about what I wanted for my life and the people in it.
As I turn twenty-six, I am in a relationship with an intensely wonderful person. Spending time with her is like walking the cobblestone streets in one of those venerable classic towns feeling timeless and welcome. I really wish I could see her today.
So, until next time. I am going to start off my twenty-seventh year phones in, making my way through the rest of my beloved winter. I think I will start with Serenity, by the Bouncing Souls. After that, we’ll see.
Go Eagles.
