Y the Y?

Before today I had never heard the statement, "Once a cougar, always a cougar." Reflecting on it, however, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. In high school I thought that I would always be a Don. Now that I'm out of high school I've realized how little I actually care about Spanish Fork High. BYU is different though. It has a legacy and a reputation. Going to BYU is a unique experience because of all these dang mormons. I thought it would be normal for me to go to a school with a bunch of LDS kids because my high school was hugely mormon, but it's not the same. I love that we can start class with a prayer or relate the topic in class to the gospel. I was in the PS lab the other day and one of the TA's was talking about gravity. Someone asked if the earth would eventually be sucked into the sun because of it's gravity. The TA was like, "yes, it would, except by that time the sun will have grown big enough to envelope the earth anyway. But I figure, hey, Christ will have come by then and we won't have to worry about it." I thought that was way cool that we could just talk about something like that at school. I like that I can look around the Cougareat at lunch time and see a bunch of kids praying over their food. That's not something that people feel comfortable doing anywhere else, but at BYU it's almost normal.
Once I graduate from BYU I'm not really sure what kind of responsibilities that will entail. I'm sure that according to the school it means I should donate lots of money to invest in the future or something. And if I marry a rich man that may happen. But I think it's more of a moral responsibility to keep BYU an upstanding university. If I didn't like the people I knew that came here or if people talked badly about it I wouldn't have wanted to come here. So I need to tell people why I like it so that they will have the same opportunity as me.

Inventory

One aspect of school that is a lot better than I expected is the homework load. Coming here everyone was like, "oh you're going to have so much homework, you're taking way too many credits, blah blah blah," but I haven't had too much. Part of this may be due to the fact that I'm taking dance classes that I never have homework for, but even if I don't count the dance classes I haven't had as much homework as I anticipated. Now this may change after I take my first test in all my classes and realize I should be spending more time on homework, but for now my workload is fairly decent.

Something harder than I anticpated is the expectations of some of my teachers. Some of my classes are really hard, and it's not just that we have a lot of homework or anything, it's just that there are some hard concepts to understand or like the teacher's expect us to know things that we haven't been taught. This isn't in all of my classes though, just a couple of them. Overall it hasn't been bad, but there are always a couple classes that are just killer. It's the way the world works.

If I could change one thing it would be my schedule. Every day except for Tuesday I have these random breaks between classes and it's really annoying. It's not long enought that it's really worth it to drive home, but it's long enough that I run out of things to do. I'll bring a textbook or something and read for a while, but I usually finish my reading before my next class starts and then I feel like I'm just wasting time, but there's not really anything for me to do.

Adventures in Zoobieland

My adventure began in the apartment, trying to make the roommates wake up. For some reason they weren't too excited about going adventuring. I finally got them up and as we were driving to campus someone was like, "hey what's that building?" And I knew that it was the Hinckley Building, but none of us had ever been in there so we decided we should check it out. So we go in there and there are all these ladies like asking if we need any help and we're like, no we're just looking around. So we wandered away and found this really cool conference room. And then we found the stairwell and all the doors said "Authorized Personnel Only," but we peeked and no one was in there so we went in anyway. There wasn't much upstairs, mostly just offices and conference rooms. And then we decided to sneak out the basement and we found all these graduation robes. Which I totally wasn't tempted to put on at all. Once we got out of there the next stop was the HFAC. Okay that building doesn't look that big, but I swear it has about 80 floors. We got super lost in there, and we were sneaking around and everytime we heard someone coming we would jump like a foot, it was so funny. But the best was when we got to this bulletin board. There was crap written all over this thing. So of course we didn't add our own little touch because that would have been completely immature. After that we started to get kinda tired so we took a little nap, and then continued on. We didn't know where to go from there, so we played around the MOA for a little bit, and then went to the JFSB. We wanted to go up the cool looking spiral staircase, but they had it blocked off so we couldn't. So then we went to the Eyring and we got to go on the roof and look at Jupiter!! (The picture that looks like a moon with moons would be that large planet of which I am speaking). Super duper cool. We're pretty much nerds because we played with all the stuff in that building, but hey what can you do? But then we really started getting tired and decided to head home. It was a pretty good dang adventure.

Bloch Talk

On Wednesday after class I went to see Bloch's painting of Christ at Bethesda. It was huge, and it made it so much easier to notice the little details that I didn't see in class. With all the shadows, some things that were hidden before came into view, like the man in the bottom left corner. I think this is who I am like the most right now. Most of the people in the painting aren't paying attention, there are only like three people actually looking at Christ. The man in the corner is one of them. He's not sick and waiting to be healed, it looks like he was just going about his business and scrubbing the floor or something. But then he notices Christ, and his attention is immediately fixed on Him. And I think that's kind of where I am right now. I'm not the sick waiting to be healed or the people ignoring Him, but I respect Christ and look up to Him. I know I'm not as close to Him as I could or should be, but I'm working on it. And that's what I think that man is doing. Also, it was much easier to see the themes of light and dark in person. Christ is so bright in this picture, and it's like he's lifting the sick man's veil and bringing him into the light. In class we talked about the man with the red hat as well. He seems to be a central focus of this painting, but he's not a main character. Some people said that he looked disgusted or mad, but I don't agree with that. I think looks so weak and is craving what the other man is getting, but doesn't know how to receive Christ himself. With our theme of disciple-scholarship, this painting obviously teaches more about the disciple side. It shows what can happen with humility and faith, and how Christ will bless you and heal you of all your sins and pains. Overall I think the painting is wonderful and love what it says about Christ.