Possible injury

So I woke up during the night last night not feeling well, and walked into the bathroom where I guess I fainted because I woke up on the bathroom floor. So I got up and I guess I fainted again because again I came to lying face down on the bathroom floor. So I got up again and started to feel dizzy so I got down on the floor and didn't faint. I must have hit the wall and/or other things on one or both (I think both) of those falls because I've got some bumps and/or bruises on my head now.

This has led me to a couple of questions:

1. How can you fall face first and cut the back of your ear?
2. Why on earth would your body wake itself up so it can faint? Couldn't I just have fainted in my sleep and saved us all a lot of trouble?
3. Can you faint because of something you ate?
4. Can you faint from a broken heart?
5. Does anyone want to take a trip to Argentina this summer?

Whims

Sometimes I do things on a whim. For example, I might buy imitation almond extract (benzaldehyde) or peppermint oil on a whim. Or I might give my little brother the chocolate I just bought on a whim. Or I may learn pager code or send flowers on a whim.

So today, on a whim, I decided to take a bus north. See, I got out of class at 1 pm without any obligations for the rest of the day, and I thought maybe I'd read a book I've been wanting to read, and I wondered whether I'd rather read it in the library or in the attic in which I live or elsewhere. And I thought, why not on a bus headed north? So I took the first bus that came by - the 830. I decided to then transfer to the 811 which got me to TRAX. I was thinking of maybe even taking Front Runner to Ogden or something. But instead I remembered how to get to a park, so I got off on 21st South and took the 21 bus east to the park where I read for a while. Then I walked a little before taking the 21 west back to the TRAX station, from which I took another train north to Temple Square where I got out and walked around for 10 minutes before catching the next train south. It was much colder than I expected. I only had on a light jacket. Light in terms of insulating ability, but dark blue in color. I also walked through water (for the sake of consistency) that was deeper than I'd expected at this park, so my feet were wet. They still are - I'll have to take off these shoes before too long. I then took the 811 back to Provo. It was almost a seven hour trip. I read about 160 pages. Maybe I'll finish the book tonight - I've only got about 40 pages left. And nothing better to do unless another whim hits me.

These are some things that happened:

A goose hissed at me. There were geese at the park, and I walked near them and one hissed. I was in the act of apologizing to the geese for intruding when this one hissed, which made me feel bad. And caused me to fear for my life. There were a lot of geese there.

While walking quickly to try and keep warm at Temple Square, a kind upper-middle-aged man with a wool top coat and a white name tag thought I might be lost and told me I had to go all the way around the fence to get out. I thanked him, and said to myself, "Couldn't I jump over the fence as well?" There are a lot of metaphors involving jumping fences. All of them go back to how my dog didn't jump over the fence in my back yard.

A drunk man got onto the TRAX train headed south, and tripped on the stairs. I almost stood up to help him to his feet, but he was already managing on his own. He wasn't all that drunk. This reminded me of a man (I can't remember his name - this is going to bother me until I do remember, I may have to look it up) in San Martin, Argentina, who I helped out of a ditch after he'd failed to ride his bike successfully while drunk. He was all that drunk. He kissed my hand several times. This memory may also have contributed to my hesitation in helping the gentleman on the train today.

I loaned my cellular telephone to a stranger on the 811 bus heading to Provo. He talked for 3 minutes and 14 seconds to someone that he loved, and who had been expecting him on an earlier bus. I've found that one of the best reasons to have a cellular telephone is to be able to loan it to people on buses.

The time has come

Of all the stories I could tell about pie, I've decided to tell one. This is about Chess pie. This didn't happen to me. It happened to my brother.

So my brother was living in Baltimore for a little while. In fact, I sort of helped him move into the house where he lived there, and spent a couple nights sleeping on a mattress on the floor of his room. It was not a level floor by any means. The floor also creaked. So it was hard coming in at four in the morning after a 12 hour drive back from Atlanta after the Chattahoochee Singing Convention without waking anyone else up. It was an old house. So the guy who owned the house was kind of a character, to say the least. Which later turned to creepy. By the time he moved out, my brother suspected that he was stealing and/or reading his mail. He was a relatively wealthy man who made it reasonably big in the perfume industry. My brother was making a chess pie at one point, and this gentleman came in and asked what he was making, and asked how it was made and they talked for several minutes about chess pie while my brother finished preparing it for baking. He went to the oven to turn it on, and the owner said, "Oh, the oven's broken." So my brother couldn't bake his chess pie. He thought it was interesting that he'd waited to tell him that the oven was broken until the pie was ready to go into the oven.

I don't know what became of that unbaked chess pie. Maybe it was thrown away. Maybe it was taken to someone with an oven. Maybe it was frozen until it could be taken to someone with an oven. Maybe it was frozen until the oven was repaired. Maybe it was eaten raw. Maybe it was eaten raw by squirrels. These are all possibilities, some of them much more likely than others.

Cry

Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz – When Isaac Newton published his Law of Universal Gravitation in 1687, he immediately met with criticism from the great German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. To Leibniz, the idea that one object can affect another object millions of miles away was totally absurd. He dismissed the whole idea as a "self-perpetuating miracle." Newton, who was a very devout man, replied in essence, "I don’t know how God made it that way, I only know that he did make it that way."

This is something I read today that brought me to tears. I knew it would when I chose to read it. It's funny how context can change everything. This is actually a paragraph from a talk my dad gave at my grandfather's funeral. I was in Argentina when he gave it, and he sent me a copy. For some reason this is perhaps the most powerful part of that talk for me.

I wrote a poem yesterday about a conversation with my dog on the eve of her death and an incident with my grandma shortly before her death, and maybe about other losses. This is what led me to read this today - I was looking to cry.

Christ said, "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit."

A Remarkable encounter

So, this seemed remarkable to me. I don't think that it necessarily is. In either October or November of 2002, I took the SAT. I'm leaning towards October, because I think it was after the Thanksgiving break that Catherine Green mysteriously knew my score. It turned out not to be such a mystery. But as I was leaving the testing center after completing the test, this other kid who'd also just taken it asked me about one of the questions on the math part, wondering what I'd put and if he'd done it right. My feeling is that I recognized this kid from the 1999 Central Utah Science and Engineering Fair as being a student at Meridian, a private school in Provo. I later had a one week class with him as I started at BYU, so maybe I found out he went to Meridian then. If you know Avi Giliadi, who was on my soccer team when I was in about 6th grade, this kid reminds me of Avi. I probably wouldn't recognize Avi any more, but I think of his name whenever I see this kid. I don't know this kid's name.

Here's where the remarkability index jumps through the roof:
So yesterday I took the GRE (also produced by ETS, and with a very similar format to the SAT, though they didn't have the writing section in 2002). And just now, I saw that same kid from Meridian. I didn't talk to him, he was just walking by outside. But it seemed remarkable that I would see him on today of all days.

Dead plums

This is a photograph of the dead plums mentioned in an earlier post.

It's a scan of the original film picture, so it's a bit dark.

Although photographs were taken of the freezer full of ashes, I'm not currently in possession of any of them.

And while I'm at it, I mentioned stair descent as being one of my talents - another of my talents is picking good citrus fruit at the grocery store.

The sage is full of anxiety and indecision in undertaking anything, and so he is always successful.

These are two things I've been meaning to bring up (up with which I've been meaning to bring):

1. I saw this sign on campus that said: "Redefine Service - It only takes a thought." I thought this was fantastic. I'm glad I don't have to actually physically do anything to serve any more now that I've redefined service. I just think about service and I'm set.

2. Almost everyone I know (that is, at least 1 in 10 people) has complained about the two presidential candidates, saying they don't think that they can vote for either of them or that they'll pick the lesser of two evils. I think this is interesting, because I'm 99% certain that if, two years ago, you'd asked me to pick my favorite Republican and my favorite Democrat to be the presidential candidates, I would have chosen John McCain and Barack Obama. Actually, two years ago I was in Tupungato, Mendoza, Argentina with Rodolfo Barros and wasn't thinking much about politics. But I still would have given you those names. I was thrilled with the choices this year. They sent shivers up my leg. I could see them in Russia from my doorstep. Etc.

PERFECTION essay as per your request

This is the essay I wrote, about which I told you. Unless I didn't tell you about it, because I've only told a couple people about it and I imagine only one of them might ever read this. Though there's a chance that another might at some point. But pretty much, this is for you Austin.

I already explained a little of the background of this essay to Austin. For anyone else, or as a refresher with some new details, I wrote this for a scholarship application. The prompt asked us to write a question that would demonstrate our uniqueness, and then to answer it. The length limit was one page with 10 pt font and 1 inch margins in Microsoft Word (I think). I told people who asked what I'd chosen for a question that I'd written on "When do you like to paint the rainbows." Sometimes I left the "the" out. I really did consider writing on this question, but decided not to be so * * creative. This was probably in my best interest.

Before I paste the essay, I thought I might make a comment. I've often felt that my Senior year in high school was kind of my high point in terms of writing ability. But reading this essay that I considered my best work at the time I wrote it (late December of 2002), I feel that there are a lot of things which I could improve. I mean, just some pretty basic punctuation and grammar and word choice things in addition to some more overarching content issues. A couple lines in there I'd like to go back and bash up note by note. So maybe my writing ability hasn't declined as much as I'd thought. Or maybe I'm just vain enough to always consider my current writing style as something about which it's worth writing home. Either way, I've always (or at least for the last several years) been very sensitive to dangling prepositions.

Though now re-reading it again, I recognize that I could never hope to replicate some of the syntax I was busting out back then. I mean, look at the first sentence in the Christmas paragraph - no way can I see myself writing that kind of a sentence today. And then juxtaposed with the other sentence in the paragraph... not to brag, but...


Anyway, the essay:

If tonight you were to set the alarm on your clock for "PERFECTION," when would it wake you?

I suppose to answer this question I must first define perfection. Webster's Dictionary defines perfection very well, I'm sure, but all I've got is World Book, and neither Mr. Webster nor the good people at World Book wrote my question. I personally struggle to define perfection, for it carries with it a certain ineffable quality. It is flawlessness, but such a definition requires a knowledge of what is or isn't a flaw. It is unsurpassable excellence, but then one must designate that which can or can't be surpassed. The definition on which I have settled still fails to fully describe all the facets of perfection, but I think it allows for the individual to see an individual perfection. For the purposes of this essay, and for the purposes of my present life, I'll define perfection as a state in which everything is as it should be. What, then, is my personal perfection? I am confident that there is no single answer to such a question. I can imagine innumerable situations that would be, by my definition, perfect. I have lived through innumerably more. Life is, for me, a continuing perfection, a perfection which I can only begin to describe, a perfection that defies all description. All I can do is illustrate a few examples of this perfection. All I can say is that everything is as it should be.

Perfection is gathering with my family on Christmas morning and, when the colorless glow from the pre-dawn sky fills the room with a very little light, when 400 vividly colored bulbs on a half-dozen strands of K-Mart lights tangled around a slightly sagging Christmas tree fill the room with a little more light, we sing and read in absolute unison of Christ, some of us smiling, some of us crying, all of us smiling, all filling the room with absolute light. This is perfection.

I often find perfection in music. Playing the organ for seventy priesthood holders every Sunday, though a number of them are somewhat less than vocally inclined, is perfect. Singing with the ward choir is perfect. Playing viola with the high school orchestra, playing to the point of "truculence," beyond the breaking point of not a few of my bow hairs, playing so quietly I have to strain to hear anything, all of this is perfection. Playing the piano, whether it's Brahms, the Beatles, or Blind Boone, I find perfection. Shape Note Singing, a capella, with a slightly nasal tone, the loudest slightly nasal tone I can muster, singing at the top of my lungs until my voice goes hoarse, taking a five-minute break to suck madly away at a cough drop, and then singing a bit more, this is perfection. I've been told this will ruin my voice, but I don't do it often, and when I do, it gives me more joy than I can comprehend. If my voice goes, it will go perfectly.

Perfection is researching cars, cameras, or, though he isn't so handily alliterative this time, Blind Boone.

Perfection is a 73-year-old Bishop who has seen and done it all, or at least all that is worth seeing and doing. A Bishop who was once mayor, who was once on the high-council, who was once a talented artist, who was once a prize-winning gardener, who served for thirty years as a fireman, who last week pulled someone else's calf from the canal, who wouldn't give a dime to a dishonest customer, but would give his last cent and his right hand for an honest friend in need. A Bishop who once climbed mountains. When I see such a man crumple in tears at the mention of his father, that too is perfection.

Perfection is sitting alone on a faded wooden bench under an apple tree that hasn't been pruned for years, and watching the snow fall. It is silent. There is no wind, so the snow comes straight down; that is, unless I watch the individual flakes, for they drift here and there and a little closer, a little to the left, before they fade into the ground. If I try hard enough, maybe I too could fade without sound into the wet, brown grass. It is still silent. And then, I, driven by some force far quieter than the snow, but just as real and just as strong, I shout. There are no words, just a rush of joy, a rush of praise, a rush of perfection. All quickly fades to silent when I close my lips. And though I am certain the noise traveled no more than a foot or two from me, the sound, like that of the falling snow, echoes eternally.

This earth was created by a perfect being, who came here and lived a perfect life. There were no mistakes in the creation of the world, nor in the creation of man, and although there is vast evil in the world, that is only temporary, because no mistakes have been or will be made in the Lord's plan. Our God would not allow anything to be anything but what it should be. Such a testimony of a perfect gospel is a very comforting perfection.

I have found perfection in a hundred-thousand places, but the nearest is here and now. Perfection is sitting in an oversized folding-chair with a small brown cat curled up next to me, just barely purring. Perfection is using the line, "Neither Mr. Webster nor the good people at World Book," it is making subtle jokes about Blind Boone, it is writing an essay that I think I really like.

When, then, would my alarm clock wake me if set for "PERFECTION?" Tomorrow is Tuesday, and I have to catch the bus, so it will wake me at 5:51 A.M. I will hit the snooze button once, and only once, and I will truly wake up at six o'clock, half-ready for another perfect day. That, I think, is the way it should be.