Tag: school

Categories
Personal Update

“So I Get to Be the First Pancake?!” (Winter 2023 Quotes)

Drawing in Microsoft Paint
A work of fine art by Michael Memmott. Left: “The traditional framework for understanding compliance is stylized, hierarchical, and static. It assumes that states accept international agreements only when their governments regard them to be in their interest. Because of this, states generally comply with their obligations. If they do not, dispute resolution is available and sanctions will be used to deter violations and to punish offenders.”

It’s that time of the semester again: all the weirdest, wisest, and most unhinged quotes I’ve heard during the last four months of school, all in one place. We’ve got a liberal—nay, promiscuous—helping this time. So buckle your seat belts and remember, in the words of a random stranger I overheard: “Love is stronger than communicable disease. Trust me on this.”

The Band

The closest you get to a one night stand at BYU is ‘hey do you want to do the bowling deal with me?’ —Brandon

Emily (about Portal): I really love the little turrets. They’re so cute.
Brandon: Probably 70% of my social skills come from those turrets. Conservative.

I have as much reading comprehension as a poodle right now. Possibly less. —Emily

That’s actually a swear word in my conlang. —Em
My conlang is exclusively swear words. —Em, upon having this quote reread to her

I have a devil on both shoulders. —Em

As I read that sentence, my eyes narrowed promiscuously. —Camryn

People think it’s weird when I give them earlobe massages. —Michael

Every time I go to Tucano’s I feel so sick afterwards and it takes me like two business days to recover —Em

Actually they were infertile because they were vaporized. —Brandon, on the dinosaurs

Michael: Captain Crunch is like eating tacks.
Camryn: Tacks that love you.

Brandon: I wonder if there’s a place for LDS midwest emo.
Em: In French?
Brandon: It’s very niche.

That’s not a hearse, that’s Kate! —Michael

Who wants to bet that I’ll eat a screw by the end of the night? —Michael

Hot cameraman: lost to time —Camryn, watching The Ring

They’re already having a funeral, so it seems rather economical to have him die at the funeral. —Camryn

They really could have used more oboe when someone died. —Michael

You have free will. You can do whatever you want. You are like a sovereign state on the international stage. Laws are enforced, but not really. —Em, taking polysci

Okay when I say emo I just mean interesting. —Brandon

Camryn: Don’t die, Eric.
Me: Why would I do that?
Camryn: I can think of many reasons.

You should play hard to get with Colonel Sanders Eric, I think you’re worth it. —Camryn

NCMO skills, guys. I can play the mandolin with my tongue. —Brandon

I’d love to have that experience, but I would love to have someone else have that experience and transfer all the skills to me. In summary, I would not like to have that experience. —Em

BYU Faculty

There’s a line from the Bible about final exams: ‘Tis better to give than to receive.’ —Dr. Harper

This is almost as important as ‘don’t put the entire folder in the trash.’ —Dr. Eckstein

[…if I’m just standing here in the classroom], and I see Pope John Paul II. Wouldn’t that be surprising, especially because he’s dead. —Dr. Green

It’s okay to feel let down by the theory. —Dr. Green

People do say crap when they’re looking at this, but it’s an acronym. It means Commonly Recorded Artefactual Potentials. —Dr. Green

Your textbook talks about ‘Government.’ We’re going to ignore it. —Dr. Green

Anyone can kick the bucket. And most people do at some point. —Dr. Green

If you’re interested I can send you my friggin’ long dissertation. —Anonymous

Composition is the humanities equivalent of football. —Dr. Eckstein

That’s the reason I went into the humanities. I topped out at trigonometry. But it turns out that numbers are letters that are shaped differently. —Dr. Eckstein

So I get to be the first pancake?! —Dr. Johnson’s research assistant

We’re geeking out about vowels here, and you’re like, hey look, look at her consonants! —Dr. Stanley

There are people who are raised speaking Esperanto as an L1–their parents meet at Esperanto conventions, and they speak Esperanto at home. This happens with Klingon as well from time to time, but… —Dr. Whiting

People I Don’t Know

I saw a hot girl in my class, so I kinda went and sat down next to her. And I was like, ‘Your outfit makes you look like a Pokemon trainer.’ And she [thought for a second, and she] was like, ‘Do you have a type?’ And I was like, ‘Grass.’ She wasn’t talking about Pokemon. —Speaker in church

It was funny, I didn’t realize it was a date until like days afterwards. —Overheard

It’s very different when you see them in a casket and they have all their skin on. —Overheard, about anatomy class ∎

Categories
Random

Some Big Words From Some Thick Books

Eric Attica 2023

In elementary school, my teacher assigned us to read books at home and write down all the words we didn’t know. This was one of our main methods for studying vocabulary, and it continued through middle school, gradually dying out in high school English.

That was probably the apogee of my vocabulary development. There are no classes in college where you learn English vocabulary (except for domain-specific jargon). I guess the idea is that you’re supposed to already have a fully fleshed-out vocabulary by the time you get to college. And if you see a word you don’t know, you look it up yourself. Or, more realistically, you just skip it, and if anyone asks, you knew that word all along.

I just finished reading the novel Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, which was full of insightful and evocative prose, and discovered that one of the joys of reading books written for adults is exploring the outermost nooks and crannies of your language, the ones that you don’t usually reach when you’re dusting unless you’re a particularly skilled—or ostentatious—writer (Mantel, fortunately, is the former). In honor of doing this in elementary school when it was a lot harder, here are 14 words I came across this past month that I didn’t skip over, for once:

Parochial: having a limited or narrow outlook or scope.
Venality: the quality of being open to bribery or overly motivated by money.
Inchoate: just begun and so not fully formed or developed; rudimentary.
Intransigent: unwilling or refusing to change one’s views or to agree about something.
Supine: lying face upward; failing to act or protest as a result of moral weakness or indolence.
Intractable: hard to control or deal with.
Truculent: eager or quick to argue or fight; aggressively defiant.
Recondite: little known; abstruse.
Opprobrious: expressing scorn or criticism.
Syncretic: characterized or brought about by a combination of different forms of belief or practice.
Compunction: a feeling of guilt or moral scruple that prevents or follows the doing of something bad.
Equanimity: mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation.
Rapacity: aggressive greed.
Susurration: whispering, murmuring, or rustling.

Used in a sentence: “The intransigently venal guard, in his truculent rapacity, felt no compunctions over his opprobrious remark to the intractable monk of some recondite syncretic order who, lacking equanimity, responded to the guard’s parochial and barely inchoate criticisms by falling supine and mimicking the susurration of the river.”

My friend Camryn: “That was incomprehensible. There’s a word for you.” ∎

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. ∎