Long time, no see

Looks like it’s been about 4 months since I last posted to this blog.  Whoops.  I apologize to the tiny handful of people that actually pay attention to this blog.  Part of the reason, I suspect, is that I didn’t have a very clear direction for it, so after my first couple of ideas ran out, I didn’t really have anything to write about.  But with some advice from an experienced blogging friend and some others, I think I’ve got some ideas.  And heaven knows I could use the writing experience.  So I’ve decided to review some life events – some old, some new.  If you’re interested, you’re probably related to me (or procrastinating), but if it happens that you’re not, well, I guess that’s cool too.

Have you ever had one of those days?  I realize “those” is pretty vague, but everyone seems to know what you mean when you say “one of those days”.  But yeah.  I’m sure you have.  Anyways, I had one of those days not too long ago, when I got in my first car accident ever.  Not exactly a milestone I was itching to reach, but I guess it was an eventuality.

It fit the bill for “one of those days” perfectly.  It was a rainy day, dark and cold, and came at the end of a long string of events that really need not to have happened in the first place.  Long story short, I slept in, decided to drive so I wouldn’t be late to work (which needless to say didn’t work this time around), missed my turn, and somehow didn’t see an oncoming car at the next available turn when I was turning left.  Oops.  It was probably the most expensive mistake of my life so far, and I remember having that surreal feeling of, “This is a dream or something, right?  That didn’t just happen.”

Why am I telling this story?  Well, I’ve noticed lately that I have a tendency to get in a funk after things like that happen.  I guess being mopey and frustrated is completely understandable when you’ve destroyed your car (nobody was injured, fortunately, and there was minimal damage to the other vehicle, but my car is pretty much done), but the long and short of it is that getting down about things doesn’t do much to make them better.  In fact it tends to make them worse.

Not to say that you can’t feel bad about it when crappy things happen, but as I’ve recently discovered, there is another option.  I’m on an intramural volleyball team, and at our most recent match, we lost our first game.

Okay, so that’s a bit of an understatement.  We got spanked.  25-8.  It was ugly.

Suddenly, though, I decided that we were better than this.  And I decided that I wanted to get out there and play volleyball the way I love to play volleyball, and all I had to do was get into it.  We were all just kind of standing around, watching as we lost point after point.  So for the second game, I got the team together in a huddle.

“New rule,” I said.  “After every point, everyone has to run screaming to the middle of the court and high-five each other!”

I’m pretty sure everyone thought I was joking.  At least until I did it on the first point, and they all realized that I was crazy.  But after a handful of awkward, half-hearted jogs to the middle of the court to exchange poorly-aimed high-fives, we couldn’t help but laugh a little bit and get a little excited.  We were here to play volleyball!  And if we couldn’t win at it, we could at least be ridiculously spirited about it, right?

The credit goes to my team for what happened next.  We started playing, and playing well.  We got some hits in.  We stole the momentum.  We probably confused the daylights out of the other team with our spastic cheering between points.  And we started winning!  Slowly, our fake enthusiasm turned into real confidence and excitement over our success.

We won the second game, 25-10.  The referee called us over for the coin toss to decide who would start the serve for the tiebreaker game, and told us he’d never seen anything like this in his life.  We went from losing by a landslide to winning by a landslide, and he expected an exciting close third game to finish out the match.

We rocked the beginning of the game, and started to run away with it towards the end.  We even got to match point, 14-9.  Their best server then came on and served 7 straight points to win it, 16-14.  But it didn’t really matter to me.  We went out there and gave it our all, and came away with something to be proud of.  It was an exciting match, and more importantly, an empowering experience.

I guess what I’m trying to say with all this is that attitude is everything.  It’s one of those annoying things that people always say and I can’t stand it, but it’s true.  Sometimes you just have to decide that you’re going to live the life you want to live, and go do it.  I’d highly recommend it the next time you’re having a lame day.  The results will surprise you; I know it sure surprised me.

You might even accidentally enjoy it.

Raised on Video Games

My best friend from the good ol’ childhood days runs a consistent blog called “RaisedOnVideoGames” about his experiences growing up, and asked me to write a guest post for him, which you can check out here.

I feel like I should put in a plug for his blog.  It’s awesome, basically, and an absolute must-read for anyone who, like me, grew up on video games like Oregon Trail and The Legend of Zelda.  His posts always have a healthy measure of humor and nostalgia, and I’d highly recommend checking out some of his older posts and following his blog.

If you look closely, you might even find some references to me mixed in his posts!  Because I know that’s what you do all day, you know… look for references to me on the internet… ahem.

Anyways, be sure to check it out!

Fried-Egg Surprise

It was a hot June day on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, Russia, when Elder Khruschev (yes, like the former Soviet leader) turned to me and said, “I think we should visit Sofia again.”

My initial reaction was to wonder why on earth we’d want to do that, but only two days earlier we’d stopped by this same babushka’s apartment (babushka = old lady, or grandma) at his insistence, only to find her feeling terrible and close to calling an ambulance.  We had explained that Elder Khruschev felt we needed to stop by for some reason, and gave her a priesthood blessing, after which she felt much better.

With that experience so recent in my memory, I wasn’t about to say no.

“Alright, let’s go,” I said.

When the elevator, which had enough graffiti on its walls to keep someone busy reading for a few hours, finally got to her floor, we instantly smelled something burning.  We knocked on her door, noticing the smell was even stronger here, and soon the door opened to reveal a blanket of smoke.

Sofia’s four-foot figure waved us into the apartment.  We could hardly see from one end to the other of her tiny apartment.

“I’m all in smoke!” she said in an adorable but exasperated voice.  “Help me open the windows!”

We quickly set to opening all her doors and windows to let out the smoke.  The levers that open the windows, it turns out, were too high for her to reach, so our arrival turned out to be quite fortuitous once again.

The apartment took a while to air out, even with all the windows and front door open.  While we waited, Sofia quite animatedly unfolded the saga of how she had left in a hurry earlier and, in her haste, completely forgotten that she had been cooking eggs on her stove.  A blackened crisp and an apartment full of smoke were all that remained of the eggs by the time she returned, and we had arrived a few short minutes later.

Aside from another reminder of Sofia’s comical senility and just how funny a place Russia can be, it was an interesting reminder of the fact that we’re all here for a reason, and sometimes a hunch is more than just a hunch.  Elder Khruschev was often a loud and boisterous missionary, but he was also an insightful and caring branch president for the members of that (very) small branch in Sestroretsk, Russia.  Looking back these two years, I admire the example that he set and the real difference he made in those peoples’ lives.

The Road to Hana

When I came home from my LDS mission to Russia, there were a lot of things that had changed in my parents’ house over the course of two years.  We now had a big flat screen TV, some different furniture, the living room had been painted a different color, and so on.  It took a while to get used to.  As I was looking around at all the changes, I noticed something else new.

“What’s with all these pictures of you guys surrounded by lush, green plants?” I asked.

“Oh, those are from our Hawai’i trip, of course,” came the reply.

“Hawai’i trip!? What Hawai’i trip?“

“Oh, right.  We didn’t tell you yet, did we?”

See, apparently in the midst of writing emails to me as a family every week for two years, my family somehow left out the part where they went to Hawai’i for a week while I was chilling (or freezing, rather) in St. Petersburg, Russia.  To be more precise, they decided not to tell me because they felt either too guilty or too concerned about what I might do if I found out my family was vacationing in a tropical paradise without me.

I think the most shocking part was just that they managed to keep something like that a secret from me for almost two years.  I didn’t have a clue.

Anyways, fortunately for me, my parents were sufficiently guilted by this experience that they promised they’d make it up to me sometime.  Which is (at least partially) why I now find myself with my family in Maui when I should be attending my summer classes.

This morning we woke up at 6:30am (not as bad as it sounds, considering the four-hour time difference – it actually felt like 10:30am) to drive along the road to Hana.  There’s really not much in Hana, it’s the road itself that’s a huge tourist attraction.  How’s that for a life metaphor?

It really was pretty sweet, though.  It’s a really winding road that hugs the mountain along the coastline, with little turnoffs all over where you can pull over, hop out, and check out the waterfalls and other sights along the way.  It’s really narrow – in a lot of places, the whole road is only one lane wide and you have to take turns with oncoming traffic to get through.  The scenery is so lush that we actually passed the Garden of Eden:

There were countless waterfalls along the way.  One of the ones we stopped for was particularly huge.  My dad and I got adventurous and decided to try to climb over to it, which our guidebook assured us would not be that hard once we got past the “first step or two”.  I neglected to take a picture of it, but the first thirty steps or so were essentially a vertical climb down a miniature waterfall. When we got to the bottom we were quite pleased with ourselves, but an expanse of large boulders and rocks still stood between us and the view we wanted, and we were both only wearing sandals. 

The fact that we survived the trek down that first stretch gave us enough of a sense of accomplishment that we decided to turn back instead of pressing on, so we climbed back up to the road just in time to greet a surprise rain shower.  It was a weird rain – instead of big, heavy raindrops, there were just tons of tiny ones.  Kind of like walking through a really heavy mist.

Next up was a short cave (actually an old hollow lava tube).  It was a lot of fun to climb through, although we almost turned back prematurely when we hit what appeared to be a dead end.  Our perseverance was rewarded by an awesome scene, somewhat reminiscent of the new Pirates movie:

A short drive from there was an awesome little area that was pretty much exactly what you picture when you think “tropical island.”  We ate lunch there, which was delicious, and watched waves crash against the rocks.  I don’t know how anyone who lives in Hawai’i manages to get anything done with views like this nearby:

In the end, we never even drove all the way to Hana.  Just short of town there was a big black sand beach (the sand is made of volcanic rock).  I haven’t been to a beach in forever, so I spent a lot of time just letting the waves wash up to my feet.  As we were leaving, we noticed a little cave off to the side, which led back to the water:

This cave didn’t have any sand, just big black pebbles.  Being my usual clueless self, I ran out to where the water was washing in to try and get all the black sand off my feet and sandals.  It worked pretty well, until I heard a loud WHUMP! to my right as an abnormally big wave smashed against the cliff wall.

Oops.

I had apparently gone a bit further out than I should have, and was rewarded with a nice saltwater shower (I was wearing street clothes).  I also got a friendly reminder of what the ocean tastes like.  Fortunately my phone survived the ordeal, so I was able to torture you all with these pictures!

All in all it was an awesome little excursion.  If you actually read all of this, I hope you haven’t already disowned me as a friend for not bringing you along.

I probably wouldn’t blame you, though.

Why I love the Internet, part 2

I’ve been trying to get more organized recently (a quest that I imagine will continue for eternity without ever really being fulfilled), and simple things like an online to-do list are incredibly helpful, especially since I can apparently add things to it from my phone.  That help’s me circumvent Sean’s Third Rule of Irony, which states that I will never think of things I need to do when I’m in a position to do them or write them down so I’ll remember later.  Now I can add things to my to-do list anytime, from anywhere!  Take that, universe!

In fact, universal access and cross-integration have to be one of the coolest parts about the internet, and they're becoming more and more common.  I used to think Windows Live was lame.  Come to find out that they’ve now integrated Facebook status updates and chat into Messenger, included blog-editing software, and added a service that let’s you sync folders to the internet (so your documents are simultaneously backed-up and accessible from anywhere).  No more emailing things to myself!

While being able to organize my life a little better is certainly a nice side-benefit, it has occurred to me that the primary benefit from all of this is that I get to feel cool and tech-savvy until the newness wears off.  And fortunately, there’s enough new internet stuff coming out all the time that we can all feel cool and tech-savvy all the time.

Go technology!

Why I love the Internet, part 1

Whoever came up with the idea to have blogging websites track statistics on how many people were viewing their blog was a genius. I realize I’m easily amused, but there’s a certain part of me that gets all giddy watching the pageviews on this blog slowly (um, very slowly) go up, and seeing that a few of the people looking at my pitiful blog are doing so from cool places like Germany, Russia, Uganda, and the Netherlands.

Granted, those are all are friends that happen to live in those respective places at the moment, but it highlights just how great the internet really is. See, in order to make a series of vain writings about myself and my personal thoughts on the world 100 years ago, I would have had to collect peoples’ addresses, buy a ton of stamps and envelopes, and write out (or type on a typewriter) the same message ad nauseum to send it out to all of my friends. They would have gotten there in a couple weeks, and most of them probably wouldn’t have been very happy to get a letter with that kind of stuff instead of a personal letter anyways.

But now, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I can do all of that in about no time at all, and my friends on the other side of the world can read it in a matter of seconds. Awesome? Absolutely.

Besides, the internet has a way of making mundane things interesting. If you’re reading this, chances are that you’ve spent more time than you’d like to admit reading Wikipedia articles and opening all the links to stuff you don’t understand.

I, for one, have never found myself on Wikipedia at 2am with 20 tabs of varying astronomy and physics articles waiting to be read in the background. Never…

Procrastination at its finest

It was inevitable.

I’ve been wanting to start a blog for a while now (ever since I learned that people I know have blogs, and that some of them are actually pretty entertaining). True to my nature, though, I kept putting it off and saying, “Oh, maybe someday.” So why did I break with tradition and an impeccable record of procrastination and suddenly decide to actually make it happen?

Ha. Because I’m actually procrastinating something else in the process.

I love when procrastination gets you to stop procrastinating. Faced with the choice of starting the 7 page paper that’s due on Tuesday or fulfilling my lifelong dream of starting a blog, the choice was easy. Okay, so maybe “lifelong dream” is a bit of an exaggeration. And I suppose going to bed at a decent hour was also an option. But still, can you blame me?

So, I am happy to announce that I will be procrastinating many future assignments by posting to this blog, and in the process I’ll be helping you, my friends, procrastinate your assignments by reading these posts!

You gotta love multi-tasking.

So, welcome. I hope you all enjoy reading this stuff as much as I enjoy writing it. And in case you were wondering, the blog’s title is funny if you know Russian.

If you don’t... well, pancake.