Befuddlement

I've been in Utah long enough now that I'm beginning to enjoy it. The lack of gross humidity, bugs, high school students, and curfews are all starting to appeal to me. Though maybe it's just because it finally cooled down. That desert sun is serious business without a layer of water in the air to dilute it a bit.

Some things, though, I wouldn't expect to change. The water tastes about the same, my pants still fit, and I still don't feel like doing homework. So imagine my surprise at one difference about Utah that I still don't understand. Yes, I'm talking about the toilets.

All my life, when finished, I've pushed the little handle and the toilet flushes. It seems easy enough. And yet here in Utah, there is a strange development that nobody has had the guts to talk about yet. Here it is: in Utah, almost half the time, you have to pull up on the handle. There's absolutely no explanation for it. And it appears to be random. New, old, makes no difference. Some handles just don't work when pushed down. I have yet to come up with a satisfactory explanation, and the people I could ask don't want to be bothered by toilet questions. So I'm left to my own thoughts, and here are the possibilities I've come up with.

1) They don't want water to be wasted when people accidentally fall on the handle.
2nd) They want us to be thinking upward, positive thoughts, even in the bathroom.
III) It's harder to break a handle when pulling up instead of pushing down.
Four) There is no 4.
The Fifth) Profit.

If anybody else has an explanation for this, I'd be glad to hear it. Until then, I'll take another nap. I love those so much...

Politics is Serious Business

I finally found a candidate I feel good about.

http://www.bigfootnessie08.com/

Writing

Rather than comment directly on my dad's new post, I'm going to write what I think about the last part of it here. Writing is most certainly the only way I can find out what I think. A quote from a class yesterday:

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means."

--Joan Didion

Whoever that is. But it's perfectly true. I was about to write a letter to the Daily Universe (BYU's newspaper) is response to some other letters I disagreed with. As I began to write, I realized I knew exactly how I would counter every argument I was trying to use. So much for that idea.

Another great example. I was about to write a paragraph or so about some things I'm finding interesting about Ender's Game as I read it for the first time. About halfway through, though, I realized I didn't really think anything interesting about it at all, at least not yet. Except it's science fiction with an intuitive, fast-moving plot, which makes it my favorite kind of book.

The one place I've written more than anywhere else is in my journal. I have a notebook, a full-sized journal, and most of a second one filled with entries dating back to 2003, I believe. And just as writing tells me what I'm thinking now, reading my own writing tells me what I was thinking then, more than I would think. Even stupid entries like, "Well, we've got the first playoff game tomorrow. 7:00 @ Hampton-Dumont. I need to rest up for it." That's only half the entry, but it's a good example of many entries I put in because I wanted to write something every day. It also tells me what I was thinking then: what was important, who I cared about, what was on my mind. Especially when I look at other entries around it. Keeping a journal was one of the things I definitely did correctly when I was 13. I don't know how many other things fit that description. What was I like at age 13, anyway?

I guess I could check my journal...

Peer Pressure

Seems everybody and their dog's cat's hairdresser's uncle's sister's second cousin's fish has what my generation doesn't even know was once called a weblog, and I'm rather impressed by what the Teusch clan has offered to the heathen gods of the intarwebs so far, from pure insight to pure -- whatever you call the perfection Mark has spewed forth.

So, while I'm totally against this whole thing, I have joined the fray, and that band will probably still be horrible regardless of what appears here.