Category: Personal Update

Categories
Personal Update

Feeling 21 (Summer Update!)

playing guitar on a stage

Gee whiz. It’s probably time for another update. Life sneaks up on you sometimes—it’s been a whole year since I’ve been back in the United States, and last month I hit the ripe old age of 21, which means I’m officially overage in all respects except health insurance and rental cars.

My oven blew up last month. It was an adequately showy coronation of my adulthood. One moment, I was studying in my room while an innocuous pan of fish filets and crescent rolls was baking, and the next—BANG! I ran out to the kitchen to see blue and orange flames bursting from the control panel of the oven. I went for the fire extinguisher (not the first time that has happened with this oven), but fortunately the flames went out before I got to use it. The fire did leave a nice black spot on our wall. I spent the night on a friend’s couch thanks to the noxious odor that the explosion released, and we luckily got a new oven from management within the week.

I’m still at BYU studying linguistics, which will probably be the case for a while. Most of my time is spent on school and work right now. Over spring term I took Japanese and grammar, which was a hefty load for the abbreviated term, but I survived Japanese and ended up getting hired on as a TA for grammar starting in the fall. This summer term I’ve only been in Japanese 202, which has honestly been enough of a handful by itself. I definitely underestimated how difficult Japanese would be, and I’m a little scared of 301 in the fall. I’ve also been working a few research jobs in addition to my desk job of linguistics secretary: I finished my religion project, edited a couple papers for a professor, and have been helping another professor in the department with a paper on Danish phonetics/phonology.

For the last couple weeks I’ve also been participating in a workshop to learn how to rate language proficiency on the ACTFL scale. It’s also been assigning homework, but I’ve enjoyed learning about the factors that the ratings are based on and practice doing some proficiency interviews myself; there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than I’d have thought. I’m still trying to find out what niche in linguistics I want to specialize in, so I’m glad I could get a taste of the assessment side.

Oh, and I joined a Celtic folk band! It turns out there’s plenty of cool musicians hiding in Provo if you know where to look. The conductor/professor is Mark Geslison, who’s incredibly fun and talented, and he also happens to be the brother-in-law of some of my favorite people in Denmark. All of the members have such vibrant personalities, and I definitely feel unqualified to be playing with them. But I reckon that feeling is always a part of being involved in music or any performing art, and ultimately I’m just happy to be there.

I also started reading Harry Potter again, which is a trap. You can’t read one of those books without reading the whole series. I wish I knew what it was that makes Rowling’s writing so engaging. I’ve got opinions though. Book Ginny is vastly superior to Movie Ginny and is honestly magnetic. And the fifth movie should not have cut the scene at the end where Harry smashes Dumbledore’s office.

No recap is complete without quotes from the semester. In the spirit of the @BYUoverheard Instagram account, there’s a fair number of overheard quotes here from anonymous strangers. Enjoy.

"And then someone makes you listen to stuff you don't normally listen to...and now I'm quite partial to digeridoo music."
"If I had a nickel for every time I've made out in the MARB, I'd have more than a few nickels."
"He's a guy. He's not a boy, he's not a man, he's a guy."
"I’m a simple woman; I like collocates and pina coladas." –Auna, Greek Goddess of Linguistics and Serial Killers
"Pax Mongolica: after the Mongols killed everyone, there was peace." –Gross oversimplification of history, courtesy of Brandon
"I'm going to do a literature review on funeral potatoes." –Ben, the third mandolinist in a row
"That joke just nailed me in the coffin. Wait" –Sals
"I’m single as an…individually wrapped cookie."

And this overheard exchange on the ground floor of the library:
"Is this floor number three?"
"Yeah."
"Why on God’s green earth is this floor number three?"

So there’s a lengthy update on where I’ve been for the last couple months. As always, I’m so grateful for my friends and family and all the people who make this journey worth taking. ∎

Categories
Personal Update

A Fluorescent Bathroom Scooter

An art gallery display

“As for you, you whitewash with lies; all of you are worthless physicians. If you would only keep silent, that would be your wisdom!” (Job 13:4-5, NRSV)

I went to the bathroom at work this week, and right as I walked in, there was a fluorescent pink scooter lying in the middle of the tiled floor. Some hip-hop-influenced pop was emanating from one of the stalls, and beneath the dividing wall I could see a pair of brightly colored sneakers. It felt like this guy owned the bathroom. I couldn’t help but smile. He’d turned it into his work of art for a few minutes—and I think the world needs more of that kind of color.

Honestly, universities might be the best places to find art in all of its forms. I had this conversation with Auna after she and her husband came to my vocal recital and we were waylaid by the foyer gallery. There’s still so much weirdness, as people here are reaching out to touch the world in brand new ways at their peak level of creativity before going out to be crushed by the corporate universe. (Not that college life isn’t crushing in its own ways—it just does so in a way that somehow fosters nonconformity, not the other way around.)

I think the most touching pieces of art are the ones that call us to listen—even when that listening is painful. Pictures can be loud and shake us to get our attention, or they can sit still and unassumingly whisper, “I’m here, too.” Somehow they reach us differently than text. They’re more real, more demanding. The “APOS” display by Anna Wright (Instagram: @frizz_biz) was particularly intimate. Listening to her story, I heard my own.

I don’t think being a good speaker makes one a good person, but being a good listener, willing to listen no matter what, does. It’s a shame that we put good speakers up on the podium.

It’s cruel of Auna to be leaving Utah so soon after we’ve become real friends. Good things too often come bundled with bad things, and for some reason, the things that stay with me the longest are always the things that stay with me the shortest. C’est la vie. As she’s so faithful about reminding me, it might be tough, but it must be good for the plot. ∎

Categories
Personal Update

Free Financial Advice from Eric and His Parents

Image credit: Maria Orlov on Pexels

Here’s a less serious post today. And at risk of this becoming a public dream journal (see this post from a few months ago), here’s the traumatic tale of an ill-fated trip through Copenhagen.

So there I was, driving my car down the crowded Danish streets. The thing about European road design is that they really like roundabouts. The Freudian unconscious within me recognized that fact, but failed to remember that Denmark is flatter than Amsterdam in a Belgian waffle iron, and so I found myself careening down a big-city hill as steep as any you’ll find in Seattle, but with roundabouts strung down the middle of the entire hill.

Now, anyone who’s played Mario Kart knows that you can’t go around a roundabout when there’s a perfectly good path over the middle of the roundabout–and when you’re going seventy miles an hour, there isn’t much choice either way. What followed was a harrowing roller coaster ride. I survived; the car survived; I looked around for police officers; there were none; I drove away scot-free, shaking in my sleeping bones.

Or so I thought, until a ticket for $77,000 from the Danish police showed up in my mailbox. My heart sank. Sure, I’d damaged some city property in my hasty driving, but this was utter financial ruin. I went to my parents, ready to beg for financial assistance, and explained my plight. Ever the pragmatist, my dad offered, “Well, it looks like you’re either going to have to get a job that pays more, or start spending less.” I awoke with bankruptcy pounding in my ears.

So there’s the free financial advice. You can consider that a legal endorsement and everything.

What’s new with me? Well, I’m still in school, on track for a December 2023 graduation with a BA in Linguistics (so far so good). Beyond that, the details are a little fuzzy. I plan on eventually going into academia, and I’ve been taking coursework in English teaching this semester in hopes of getting some practical skills and a background in second language acquisition in addition to just the liberal arts degree. My summer plans are still up in the air. I’ll also be moving apartments in the fall, which is always a gamble, but I enjoy the feeling of starting fresh in a new place.

I’ve been working on a couple songs that I hope to release pretty soon, though there never seems to be enough time to go around. It’s midterm season, which is no fun to write about, but does take up a good deal of time. I hope it all makes me a better teacher one day. ∎