Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Obligatory blog post

Writing this post right now without much of a specific thought or topic this week, mostly because I don't have one for now. So here are just some goings-on:


  • Had a job interview today for the position of EFY counselor, which I'd love to do over the summer if I get offered a contract. They'll let me know at the latest by March 31st.
  • Currently I have a job at Subway, so at least I've got that in the time between now and summer. Still applying at other places, because I'll likely get no more than 20 hours a week there.
  • Almost done with Mere Christianity. In keeping with the resolution, I'll make sure I'm done with it before the end of this month, so that shouldn't be too hard.
  • Hot Rod came in the mail, so that's in my collection now. Still need to watch Fantastic Mr. Fox.
  • Tomorrow I have an opportunity to shadow someone who works at ABC Studios up in Salt Lake. I'm not even sure what all I'll be doing, but I'll probably take a good amount of notes (and pictures if they allow - in which case I already know the subject of my next post).
  • Still getting used to the CPAP machine. It takes me a while to get to sleep, but I can wake up at the same time that I have been and I feel much more refreshed and awake throughout the day.
  • Valentine's Day is coming up. Not that I have anything planned for it yet, but it's on my mind.
I think that's about it for now… again, doing this mostly so I can stick with the resolution. I haven't been perfect in them all yet – which doesn't mean that I'm giving up on the ones that I'm not perfect on – but I have been for this and I know I can keep this streak going fairly easily.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

The Plight of the Provo Bachelor: Online dating

How many people out there have gone on a date with someone they first met online? How many of those dates have been successful? Who would be able to restore my faith in it?

The appeal of using dating sites was pretty strong when I first started checking them out a couple years ago. Meet people with similar interests as yours? Talk online and see if there's any chemistry, then meet up if there is? Sure! Let's do it!

I've never had more headaches in my life.

I seriously might just be cursed as far as online dating goes, but I've never had a lasting positive experience from it. I say lasting, because I've had a couple positive experiences, but nothing that ever had a follow-up to it. Let me just go through them all, and hopefully by the end I'll have proven my point:
1) Went on a first date after talking online, and subsequently through texts, after about a week. Went to a nice Mexican restaurant, had a great conversation, food was good, and while dropping her off at the end of the night happened a litter sooner than I usually prefer, it was for a good cause; her little sister was opening her mission call and she wanted to be there via phone/Skype/whatever. We kept talking through texts for the next couple days, and when I mentioned meeting up for a second date I stopped getting any answers back. Was she not interested after all? If she was, why did things seem to go so well when we met up? Let's continue.
2) Met online, made plans for her to come down from Ogden (over an hour's drive to here) so that we could get some dinner and then see Iron Man 3 in theaters. I bought tickets beforehand, wanted to be all prepared because things looked like they were going well through our conversations online and over the phone before we actually met up. So we met, I drove her over to the restaurant, we had a pretty good conversation (from what I could tell) while we were there. Then she got up to go to the restroom and was gone for about 15 minutes. Now, I'm perfectly fine with needing to take care of natural processes, or even just wanting to take a minute to primp up a bit. That's totally okay, as I'd hope for the same allowance should I feel the need to do so myself. But for that long? I started to get a little worried.
While driving away from the restaurant, she got a call from her sister that seemed a little tense; she explained to me that her sister wasn't in the best relationship, yadda yadda yadda, and she tried to call back but never got through. Tried to call her dad to see what was up, no answer there. She said she needed to go up to South Jordan (where her sister lived) and see what was going on. Me, trying to be understanding of the whole situation, said that that was fine and that we could just pick things up another day. (I ended up asking a friend to come with me to see the movie once it was clear that this date wasn't going to stick around, and we ended up having a great time.) I did ask for her to text me later to let me know what happened, and she said she would; never got a text back, even when I sent one myself asking about everything. Checked on the site we met on, and she's deleted her profile.
I'm not really sure exactly what happened there. I mean, if I messed up during the date, wouldn't you at least have the decency to tell me, instead of just leaving me high and dry? Was all that time she spent in the bathroom used to ask her sister (if that was actually her) to call her later on? Did she just get scared of it all, and it seemed too overwhelming?
Some questions that I don't think will ever be answered. Moving on.
3) Met someone online, traded pictures of each other. She seemed cute, but only sent pictures of her face. I was initially okay with that, but when we eventually met up she looked way different in person. The pictures must have been taken years before, because in multiple ways she had changed from what I'd seen. (A tattoo, a couple piercings, and, well, a lot more weight than I'd anticipated, to be perfectly frank.) I was willing to overlook all that if the date went well, but the whole time she kept quiet and barely spoke, even when I asked her questions about herself. The most that she did talk was when she was remembering the margarita night she'd had before (which she hadn't made any mention of before that date). Awkward beyond all reason, and the only time that I've ever felt the need to end a date early on my own terms. It just couldn't have improved in any way, so I stopped it before it got worse.
4) Tinder. Oh, the infamous dating app where all you have to do is swipe left or right to show your interest in someone. Multiple times (also on other dating sites, but prominently on Tinder) I've had conversations with someone and it seems to go well, but I never get any level of commitment to meet up. Even if there's a "90% or higher chemistry" on some sites, I can talk with a girl and start to set up plans, but then last minute they cancel on me. If they even get to the point of setting up the plans in the first place. (And all that goes without even mentioning the various scams that can occur with apps and sites like that.)

5) Probably the one that's given me the biggest headache of all, and I'm still not even sure what happened with it, was when I met someone who answered an ad of mine and she was pretending to be someone else entirely. I ended up talking with this girl for months, getting to know her, making plans together… except I never actually met her in person. She claimed to be working in another part of the country and would be back in Utah later in the year, so we'd try a long-distance thing at first and go from there. The chemistry seemed pretty instant, but the fact that she never ended up being able to contact me through ways besides phone calls, texts, or emails – she didn't have a Facebook out of "personal preference" – started to bug me after a while. Incident after incident started to happen that kept delaying her return to Utah, including multiple broken bones and diseases (everything from a bad staph infection to diabetes to cancer), and even when it seemed like she was going to stay there we never had a video chat. (Despite her having an iPhone through her work, which is more than capable of doing video calls.) And then the weirdest part happened: she said someone was trying to steal her identity, and that it'd happened before. I looked up on Facebook this supposed thief, but the more I looked at it all the more it seemed like the "thief" was the real one and the girl I was talking to was the fake. It started getting to the point that I'd see pictures on the Facebook account before this girl would send them to me over the phone. To this day, she'd probably swear that it's been an elaborate scheme to not just steal her identity, but everything she has… which still doesn't make much sense to me. The fact that the girl who did have a Facebook profile had mutual friends with me pretty much confirmed the fact that this first girl that I "met" was the phony, but because of how consistent she was in everything she told me, it made me wonder if they were both the same girl, just with a multiple personality disorder. That would make more sense in the long run.

I try to be totally honest about what I put online, without revealing anything too personal. I feel like I make clear my goals, intentions, expectations, hopes, all of that. I don't mean to come across as too forward, and I definitely don't want to rush things in a relationship with anyone, regardless of how we meet. But if I'm not supposed to talk about all that… if I'm not supposed to be open about my feelings and what I'd like to have happen after a first date – which is almost always a second date – then please correct me and help grow what little hope I have for trying to meet people online. Because at the moment I've all but given up on it.
Which, for the time being, I think I'm going to be all right with, because certain prospects are starting to open up outside of this virtual world. More on that as it actually develops, though. I just needed to rant tonight about… well, everything you've read so far.



Got a new movie coming in the mail soon through Amazon: Hot Rod. LOVE this movie, and a bunch of my friends do as well, so as soon as I get it I can imagine a movie night happening.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Pure poetry

Lately I've been obsessing, as I'm prone to do, with some songs that have just… captured me. It's difficult to describe with words the exact emotion, but for me it's just entrancing to pay attention to the lyrics of some songs and enter the world they paint with their words.
I've tried writing poetry and songs before. Never been any good at it. And I'm okay with that, because it seems that there are plenty of people in this world who are pretty darn good at it. (There are also plenty who aren't quite as good, of course, but still manage to become popular somehow… but I digress.)

Here are the lyrics of a few songs I've enjoyed a lot lately. First up is "All of Me," by John Legend. I prefer the version that also features Lindsey Sterling, so I'm linking to that one, but the music video of the original features who I can only assume to be his wife, as there's footage at the end of it with them at their wedding. (Footage that's shot quite differently than the rest of the video, as if it was just from someone's phone who happened to be there at the time.)
What would I do without your smart mouth
Drawing me in, and you kicking me out
Got my head spinning, no kidding, I can't pin you down
What's going on in that beautiful mind
I'm on your magical mystery ride
And I'm so dizzy, don't know what hit me, but I'll be all right

My head's underwater but I'm breathing fine
You're crazy and I'm out of my mind

'Cause all of me loves all of you
Love your curves and all your edges
All your perfect imperfections
Give your all to me, I'll give my all to you
You're my end and my beginning
Even when I lose I'm winning
'Cause I give you all of me
And you give me all of you

How many times do I have to tell you
Even when you're crying, you're beautiful too
The world is beating you down, I'm around through every mood
You're my downfall, you're my muse
My worst distraction, my rhythm and blues
I can't stop singing, it's ringing in my head for you

My head's underwater but I'm breathing fine
You're crazy and I'm out of my mind

'Cause all of me loves all of you
Love your curves and all your edges
All your perfect imperfections
Give your all to me, I'll give my all to you
You're my end and my beginning
Even when I lose I'm winning
'Cause I give you all of me
And you give me all of you

Give me all of you
Cards on the table, we're both showing hearts
Risking it all, though it's hard

'Cause all of me loves all of you
Love your curves and all your edges
All your perfect imperfections
Give your all to me, I'll give my all to you
You're my end and my beginning
Even when I lose I'm winning
'Cause I give you all of me
And you give me all of you

I give you all of me
And you give me all of you

A bit more dramatic, especially when watching the video along with it, is "Say Something," by A Great Big World and Christina Aguilera.
Say something, I'm giving up on you
I'll be the one if you want me to
Anywhere I would have followed you
Say something, I'm giving up on you

And I am feeling so small
It was over my head, I know nothing at all
And I will stumble and fall
I'm still learning to love, just starting to crawl

Say something, I'm giving up on you
I'm sorry that I couldn't get to you
Anywhere I would have followed you
Say something, I'm giving up on you

And I will swallow my pride
You're the one that I love, and I'm saying goodbye

Say something, I'm giving up on you
And I'm sorry that I couldn't get to you
And anywhere I would have followed you
Say something, I'm giving up on you

Say something, I'm giving up on you
Say something

It's not common these days to hear a song on the radio that has so much pure emotion put into it. A lot of what I hear is, honestly, mindless lyrics put to a catchy beat. "Say Something" just has a piano and string accompaniment, at a slow but not dreary pace, and again the video shows various scenes where the lyrics perfectly describe the emotions felt.
Last one that I've been a little obsessive with is a much more upbeat one than the previous two, and while I'm linking the video here I can't say that it makes as much sense as the ones from before. But it still tells a fun story, as well as the song just by itself. "House of Gold," by Twenty One Pilots.
She asked me, "Son, when I grow old,
Will you buy me a house of gold?
And when your father turns to stone,
Will you take care of me?"

She asked me, "Son, when I grow old,
Will you buy me a house of gold?
And when your father turns to stone,
Will you take care of me?"

I will make you queen of everything you see
I'll put you on the map, I'll cure you of disease

Let's say we up and left this town
And turned our future upside down
We'll make pretend that you and me
Lived ever after happily

She asked me, "Son, when I grow old,
Will you buy me a house of gold?
And when your father turns to stone,
Will you take care of me?"

I will make you queen of everything you see
I'll put you on the map, I'll cure you of disease

And since we know that dreams are dead
And life turns plans up on their head
I will plan to be a bum
So I just might become someone!

She asked me, "Son, when I grow old,
Will you buy me a house of gold?
And when your father turns to stone,
Will you take care of me?"

I will make you queen of everything you see
I'll put you on the map, I'll cure you of disease

While it's quite often a risk to read from the comments section on popular YouTube videos, there was a good one I found that showed one person's thoughts on what the video meant:
the song seems to be about the struggle we go through trying to achieve the storybook life we've written for ourselves..this struggle literally feels at times, like it's taken a piece of us. i think the video is trying to portray this concept in very simple imagery like a man serenading at a window, reduced by the struggle at this point to a "half" a man.
Seriously, why can't we have more songs with actual meaning to them like these?! Instead we're overwhelmed with songs like "Timber":
It's going down, I'm yelling timber
You better move, you better dance
Let's make a night you won't remember
I'll be the one you won't forget
Not gonna bother linking to the video for that since it's just multiple shots of scantily clad women and drinking alcohol. And every song by Pitbull just seems to be him bragging about how amazing he is with the ladies, how many countries he's been to, etc. Again, catchy tune, but the lyrics are just… nonsense. And that's currently #3 on American Top 40. Kinda makes me worried about the direction society's going in… not that I wasn't worried already.

Listen to the ones I did link to. Worth at least one listen each, that's for sure.



New movie today! A friend of me recommended it to me a while back, and I found it in a $5 bin at Best Buy. Fantastic Mr. Fox, which has a well-known cast of actors voicing the different characters. And as it turns out, it's based on a Roald Dahl book, and I've always enjoyed the various adaptations of those in the past. This last weekend I also picked up a new DVD after seeing a stand-up comedy night at BYU. I can't find a page online about their DVD (which is a recording of one of the nights they performed on tour), so here's a link to their Facebook page. I had some pretty good laughs both during the live show and from the recording, so if you ever get a chance to see The Left Field (their name) perform, take the time and check them out.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Personal History, Part 5

As my first official blog post of the new year, as I got my last one done just under the radar, it seems sort of fitting to finish up the Personal History posts. That way, with the weekly posts I put on here, I'll pretty much always be up-to-date on what's going on in my life.


So I finished my mission in August 2011, taking a couple days' worth of flying to make it back to the United States. Transitioning to "real life" again was… not easy. I mean, I had a less than a couple weeks after I came back before the school semester started up, and I was pretty much thrown into everything that was going on here. I went to live with my sister Katie and her family, which was great, and I was associating with people my age in a setting that wasn't me preaching about my beliefs, but…
If you ever meet an LDS missionary who's just getting back from their mission, and you ask them if they would have stayed there instead of coming back home, even if it was their assigned time to return, nine times out of ten they'll respond saying that yes, they would have stayed. A mission truly is a life-changing experience, and getting to help so many people in so many ways doesn't really have an equivalent. There are so many things that I miss about my mission: the culture, the friends I made, the food, the feeling of knowing that you're doing good in the world – I can list so many more aspects of it that I'll never forget. But one of the biggest aspects was that I never had to worry about myself. About anything. Money was taken care of; we had a monthly stipend given to us, taken out of funds that we had used at the beginning to pay for it all in the first place. Our day-to-day activities were always related to helping other people, primarily through preaching the Gospel, so that was our "job," in a sense. Rent and utilities were paid for, from the same aforementioned funds. Health-wise, we had insurance that covered anything and everything that happened, including the time I sliced my foot open and needed stitches (long story, but if you ask me about it in person I don't mind telling it – see previous Personal History post for a picture).

Actually, there was one thing about my health that I got worried about for a while.

While I was working in a city called Carlos Barbosa, I started feeling this weird sensation in my head. I wasn't really sure how to describe it, and to this day I'm not even sure what to call it. Since I had only been in Brazil for about seven months, my Portuguese was still pretty broken, so the word I relied on to express how I was feeling was "tontura," or "dizziness." That wasn't really it, since I didn't feel like my head was spinning, or that I was light-headed, or that I felt like the world was spinning around me. But in any case, that was the word that I went with, and the way that I explained the sensation was that it was like I was hit in the side of the head with a baseball bat and had that feeling in my head. No pain associated with it, just that "dizziness." And that was the best I could do to plain what I felt. How it made me feel was something different entirely. I felt like I had to stop whatever I was doing and just make the bad sensation go away. Which is bad, because there was nothing that I did or said to make it come in the first place. I could be walking, I could be doing a service project, I could be sitting or lying down, I could be talking with my companion, I could be teaching a lesson, I could be completely silent – there never was a trigger, per se. And nothing made it go away, either. Which made me scared, because the counsel I received from the medical advisor of the mission, our mission president's wife, was that any time I was feeling these "dizzy spells" I should just go home and rest. That ended up becoming very frustrating to me, since the whole point of me being in Brazil in the first place wasn't to take it easy; I was there to work!
These "dizzy spells" happened almost daily, and sometimes would last for a couple minutes, sometimes for a few hours. And I just couldn't help it. It got to the point that I was transferred to a city closer to the large hospitals in the area for testing, and eventually the mission office to work as a secretary for a transfer to see if lowering the amount of stress would be effective. I don't know quite what did it, but eventually the "dizziness" subsided a bit and became more manageable, so I went back into the mission field and finished my mission regularly. The last test I did in Brazil attributed these "spells" to a rare kind of inner ear infection (even though they never actually saw one, they just said it must have been really deep) that caused episodic vertigo. I did some crazy tests while I was there: x-rays, an MRI, aural tests to make sure my hearing was okay, tests to see if I could follow lights accurately, and one test where they blew hot and cold air and water into my ear drums. None of those seemed to show any negative results, and the various medications they tried with me (including antibiotics and antidepressants) had no effect whatsoever, so their conclusion was just based on a guess more than anything else. But this lasted for a period of about seven months, and I was worried for a while that I'd have to leave the mission early.

When I finally did come back home after the full two years, I made the transition back to "reality" relatively quickly. But I don't think I did it all too well. I ended up dating someone I met from a job I got, but some things that I'd experienced from before my mission began to affect me in ways that I'd thought I'd left behind years before. Those things began to seep into the relationship I was trying to have and, to make a very long story short, I ended up saying something to this girl I was dating that made her upset. She went driving, which she was prone to do when she was upset, and on the night that she went she was hit by a truck and nearly died. Miraculously, she received help within minutes and was flown to Salt Lake for treatment. Due to the level of injury she had, and to prevent any brain damage, the doctors attending to her induced a coma, from which she didn't wake from for a few months. When she finally did wake up, she lost about six months of her memory from before the accident, and that included when she met me and all the time we'd spent together.

I don't talk about that story often, and prefer not to. But for the sake of the rest of the post, accurate context is necessary.

I went emotionally numb for a while. I just didn't seem to be able to focus on a lot of things, and that reflected in a lot of things in my life. I suffered in school, I ended up leaving the job that I was at (which is where I'd met the girl), I tried dating again but nothing happened that was long-term or that I committed to… And I didn't really recognize for a while, but those "dizzy spells" began to come back. I began to notice them a lot while I was working at a local Sonic, and I just started attributing them to stress I was feeling at the time.
I honestly didn't believe it was another "deep inner ear infection." Really? After doing multiple tests, putting me on an antibiotic and still not getting any results back from it? No. Wasn't gonna be that explanation again.
Thus started the process here of trying to figure out what was wrong with me. For the longest time I thought it might have been something in my head, something that the MRIs didn't catch. Because these weren't "dizzy spells" I was feeling. It was definitely something in my head. Something I felt. Something that merited a real explanation. I'd been going to counseling, both for the things from prior to my mission that I was dealing with and the girl who got in the accident; I took personality tests and attention tests to see if it was something like ADD or something linked to OCD or even depression; I took more physical tests, including another MRI and a couple EEGs. (Don't ask me what they stand for, I honestly don't remember at the moment. But basically the MRI was the thing where they stick you in a tube and scan the inside of your head using magnet technology. The EEG was where they glued wires all over the top of my head and monitored brain activity for a set period of time.)

And then I started doing some tests to measure how I slept. The first one I took home with me, and I set up a bunch of wires on my own including some around my chest and waist, some around my face, and one on my neck. Then a sensor on my finger to measure my oxygen level. This test was to see if I had something I'd only heard of, sleep apnea. I'm linking to the Wikipedia page here, but basically it's a condition that causes blockage of the airway while one sleeps. You're literally not breathing for some period of time, but you don't know it because you're asleep. I had no idea that I had it, even though it was suspected that I did since I'm infamous for being a snorer. (Apparently that's one of the big signs of apnea.) A couple tests later, including one where I try sleeping with a machine that's constantly blowing into my airways while I sleep, and I've been officially diagnosed with it. Not just sleep apnea, though; according to the doctor I saw yesterday, "severe" sleep apnea is about 30 of those blockages per hour while you sleep, and I suffer from about twice that many per hour. So I've got something like "extreme" sleep apnea, if it can be called that.
Being asleep while this happens, I had no idea that it was that bad, or that it was happening at all. But considering how long I've had this for, whenever it started, this could seriously have been affecting me and I just didn't realize it. So yesterday I picked up my CPAP machine (again, an acronym that I'll probably never remember what it stands for), which I'll be using pretty much every night from now on. This is basically what it looks like:
When I've got it on, I look like Christopher Nolan's interpretation of Bane, and I sound like Darth Vader. Thankfully, I'll only have to use it right when I'm going to bed, not all day long like I did once with one of the EEGs. It's going to take some getting used to, that's for sure, but this seems to be the solution to what's been going on for… well, years of my life now. My dad has been using one for a while now, and he's said that within a couple days of using it he felt instant relief in that he was much more awake and alert during the day. Here's to hoping that it'll have the same effects for me.


Now, while a lot of what I just wrote seems rather depressing, I don't want to come across as saying that I've only had bad times throughout the years. Obviously when I was on my mission I had a great time, and when I came back there were some experiences that I'm certain to remember for a long time. The Thanksgiving after I came home was one of the first times in a long time that my whole family could be together, and to celebrate that we travelled back to southern California.
From a photo shoot that a family friend did for us
I ended up switching majors, so now I'm studying film instead of animation at BYU, and loving it just as much.
At the final for one of our film classes, with an old buddy of mine, Christian Halversen
And I've become part of Divine Comedy, working behind the scenes and playing music/sound for them when needed. I could sing their praises here, but it'd be better to just watch the skits that are online (found in the link given) and let them speak for themselves. I will say that it's one of the greatest experiences I've had in my college career, and will always look back on it fondly once I've graduated and moved on from BYU.
Cast and crew of the 2012-2013 school year
I got to see my buddy Mike, my MTC companion, get engaged and married in 2012.
First time as a groomsman, and I think I did an okay job of it!
I've made some amazing friends in the ward that I'm in, and with them I could easily stay for a long time.
During a tubing trip over the summer
Impromptu Just Dance competition
At a murder mystery dinner for Halloween
Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day, where dressing up as a cow got free food
From one of our many laser tag nights
I'm feeling optimistic about 2014. No, I'm not quite in the place that I'd like to be just yet, but I'm getting there, a few steps at a time.



No new movies yet, but in part that's because I'm working on the resolution to actually watch all the ones in my collection I haven't seen yet. Like last week, when I finally saw Young Frankenstein… Fronkensteen… watch the movie and you'll get the joke. Anyway, I think I got that one from the $5 bin at Walmart ages ago just because I was already a fan of Mel Brooks, who directed this one. I just never got around to it until last week.
Also, as another step toward getting my resolutions accomplished, I went with a friend of mine to the library today as she's got a pretty similar one to mine (to read a new book every month). I ended up getting two: Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. The former I got because I've got another friend who had tons of good things to say about it, and having already read previous books by Lewis I'm sure I'd enjoy it as well. And the latter is another installment of the series about Robert Langdon, who is the main character from The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons (both of which have been turned into movies, so you've probably heard of them), so it'll be interesting to see what happens to him next.