I can go the distance

All right, let's do this like Brutus. Cruising through a week and an half before dinner. Anyone who enjoys my journal is indebted to Smurfs; I think I update about twice as often under his harsh lash. He does almost as much for my productivity as Toasteroven's cold doesn't. (And yes, Dad, I am getting enough sleep. The stupid thing's invincible.)

First off, sorry I didn't update the Monday before I left. A personal matter had quite agitated me, and the entry I wrote to address it was inappropriate for indiscriminate publicity (yeah, k_t and Greta, it's finally sunk in).

So. Monday. I accidentally slept in until, like, noon, but the dogs somehow survived. It was really a pleasure, though, walking them down the greenbelt; I've never seen nicer weather in Arizona. Apparently she was trying to convince everyone to stay for spring break. Sorry, dear, but you've hurt me too many times. My heart belongs to your neighbor now. I began to grow distressed at not finding my keys, what with their utility to the end of road trips, so the two of us had a long telepathic conversation as I walked. "Come on now, keys," I said, "be reasonable. This game of yours has been an absolute blast, I promise. I played this other game yesterday with cell phone, though, and I think you'd like it even more. It's called 'You exist, and I find you.' Basically, the premise is that you exist, and--here's the kicker--I find you. Seriously, it's amazing. After we played, cell phone and I just lay there for hours, laughing uncontrollably. You'd love it."

I packed, hung out online for a while, and finally headed back to the apartment to spend the night. After half an hour of looking, I surrendered to the keys and called AZLocKeyPer, which gave me the lowest quote of the four or five I called. Finally, the keys gloatingly crawled out from deep in the underbelly of k_t's recliner, along with my dear old RWH ring. (It looks like this, only with the outside band broken off.) I called the locksmiths back, and the receptionist kindly cancelled the order and congratulated me on finding them. I highly recommend them. 602.765.0067.

Profoundly pleased at having saved an hundred dollars, I tossed everything in the car, swung by Dad's house to finish up with the dogs, wrote down directions, and left at 12:30. My gas lasted exactly to Page, then exactly to Provo, which was very convenient, and my only stop other than Page was when a cop pulled my caravan over and reminded us that the limit was 65, so I arrived before ten. Yeah, I'm that awesome.

It was my first road trip, so my parents naturally trepidated, asking me to do as little driving at night as possible and such, which was certainly understandable. I grew rather nervous myself, though, upon hearing my father's reaction when I told him I was taking highway 20; it was as though I proposed a route through Moria itself. Father, you know I would not take it if I did not have to. Saruman controls Las Vegas, and none can stand against Stratosphere and Mordor.

Speaking of which, someone *totally* needs to invent mor d'oeuvres. I know I'd buy them. Orc eggs and Stygian paprika, I'm thinking.

The bother with leaving at noon, though, was that night fell by the time I reached Panguitch, robbing me of most of the gorgeous views south of Payson I so adore. Seriously, I cannot overstate how dear that road from Orderville to Provo is to me; I always lose my breath around the time the river meets the road and don't quite catch it until I've bedded down in the shadow of Y Mountain. I think I sang "How Great Thou Art" about thirty, forty times. I mean, people can be all, "Arizona has pretty red rocks," and I take them to Southern Utah, and show them pretty red rocks draped in life instead of standing sentinel over valleys of death, and they're like, "Oh, okay. Sorry, that was stupid." Yeah, that's right. Arizona blows.

I spoke briefly with Trevor's Pakistani roommate, who graciously gave me his bed on the couch (coincidentally, k_t made the same offer when I got back from the trip, which I've appreciatively declined). I talked to him about the whole Pakistan thing, particularly in a linguistic perspective, and learned that they primarily use Urdu, which is basically Hindi written in Arabic script. Neato-keen.

Wednesday was one of the rockinger days of my life. I got up with an hour to kill, so I hung out in the Wilk online for a bit, then headed over to Foster's metalogic class. I was toootally lost for about ten minutes, but I was volunteering axiom symbolizations by the end of class, 'cause I'm cool like that. I look forward to actually taking the class.

Foster went out his office hours in Brigham Square, but someone else wanted to talk to him, so I went and grabbed a veggie sub, after which we caught up briefly and then went to his philosophy of language class, which was a blast, 'cause we learned about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (by the way, I absolutely adore Wikipedia). Basic summary: there are no Platonic forms; our "concepts" are only transient qualities defined by social experience. Words provide the framework by which we parse raw sensory data into object and sets. Thus, our life experience is subject to the lexicon of our society.

It's a really cool thing to ponder, the way in which language shapes thought. One kid in the class pointed out that MIT even has a single department in charge of philosophy and linguistics. Man, it'd be a blast to teach in that. With computers. To psychologically remedial actuaries. Yeah...need to figure out a real major soon. I started to follow Foster to his next class, but he made several course changes in a row, after which he admitted that he wasn't really sure where he was going. Finally we ended up back at his office hours spot, where he recovered his book, then at the Wilk, where he got an asian wrap.

I grabbed a large bowl of strawberry ice cream with whipped cream, and we headed back to his office. Being as we are in BYU's Animal Rights club, animal intelligence naturally arose as an interesting Sapir-Whorf paradigm, so we talked about it for about an hour. In particular, we considered a dog's conception of its bowl, whether it has a concept of "bowlness" as opposed to "plateness." I tended to object to his examples as irrelevant to Sapir-Whorf theory, insofar as dogs have no impetus toward bowl-plate discreteness, and he disliked my use of "set theory" to describe the primitive capacity for recognizing alikeness, but we made some progress. In particular, he pointed out that while similarity seems native to cognition, language seems to define boundaries (i.e., a dog can think "y is more like x than z is," but not "z is unlike x"), which seems fairly reasonable.

I'm interested, though, in the idea that animals do, in fact, use language to some extent or another. I mean, prarie dogs appear to use language; couldn't one postulate that dogs do, in fact, create terms, but physiological restrictions prevent them from vocalizing them, that theirs is a language devoid of social constraint, controlled only by environment and utility? At any rate, it would be cool to do a test in which you train dogs to recognize, say, things made of metal and teach them a "yes" and a "no" response, all without language, just positive reinforcement. Amn't sure what it would prove, other than that I like dogs.

Gah, I'm being so lazy with this. It's taken me, like, eight hours thusfar, no hyperbole. Anyway, I went to dinner at the Cannon Center with Trevor Wednesday night, which was nicely nostalgic, and fairly tasty, in fact. I think I'll probably get the once-a-day meal plan when I'm back up there; Trevor's smart to ensure he always has a source of fruits and veggies, if aggressively processed. We talked about how unfortunate it is not knowing what's up with Gordy, what with how splendid a fellow he was. I wanted to pull over and go house-to-house asking for his parents when I drove past his town.

Oh, in between Foster and Trevor, I went over to the ASB and met with an admissions counselor, 'cause meeting with people is sooooo much better than calling them or e-mailing them. Seriously, I can count the non-awkward phone conversations I've had in my life on one hand, and they've all been with Lacie. Phones are just disgusting. Granted, I probably cause much of it by trying to control the flow of conversation, getting the last word and such, but eh. At any rate, he asked me a few questions, tappitied on the computer, and told me he just needed my ecclesiastical endorsement to consider the application. Good times.

Jen and I talked on the phone, but sadly, I'd misinformed her of my trip, and her parents had gone out of town, leaving her stranded with a bunch of cousins, and us unable to meet. Smurfs was similarly confused, but dealt with it spectacularly, gathering all the people I'd mentioned offhand as appealing to meet (and telling them that they were "on bawb's list," apparently, which amuses me). I arrived as he and TO got back from home teaching, and TO stayed out in the kitchen to talk politics with me for half an hour before retreating to his room as everyone else arrived. Thanks, TO, if you read this. I enjoyed the discussion.

We played this game called "Loaded Questions" or summat. I was rather incredibly bad. It's kind of a strange game, though, in that the goal of disguising your answers and the metagoal of making your answers funny tend to be somewhat at odds. At any rate, it was fantastic for getting to know people. I did incredibly poorly with names, though, focusing more on creating file pointers from all the attributes associated with their 'nyms to faces than on matching names with faces, but everyone else was using real names, so every time I went to talk someone, I had grood syndrome with the name and 'nym getting stuck in the door. If I just stammered at you for a moment, I'm sorry. I promise, if you were at the gathering, I liked you.

We went to IHOP, where I thoroughly enjoyed Belgian waffles with strawberries, whipped cream, and Eleka Nahmen. Not really sure what to say about her; the BNL lyric "It's all been done" came to mind as I considered it, in that I cheerfully admit inadequacy to add any new insight to prior descriptions of her. She is both startling and appealing in both semantics and aesthetics (rather respectively). Nice girl, too. Novel and Uffish had to head home afterward, so I took them on an adventure through the construction zones of Orem before meeting up with Smurfs again.

We went to the Decafe, an excellent implementation of one of the most splendid concepts I've ever heard: a Word-of-Wisdom coffeeshop. I got a creamosa, which I suppose takes away the fun of pursuing the appearance of evil, but mmmm, it was exceedingly tasty. Fahrenheit 451 (too lazy to link), one of my old faves, was on their bookshelf, but they pulled me into the back room for board games before I became irreparably engrossed. We had a splendid little game of Upwords in which Bamabeau absolutely beat the stuffing out of us with a four-word play involving sodomy. Ahem, "sodomy," rather. I would have beaten Smurfs if I'd noticed an obvious play with my last letter, but he had a much more consistent performance anyway. Wiggle herself was only a couple points behind me; we all played very well.

It was about four in the morning at that point (as it will be by the time I finish this entry if I don't depecher myself), so I headed home, not realizing {wipes a tear} that it would be the last time I saw Smurfs. Also not realizing how hard it would be to get up early the next morning to hike the Y with Novel and Uffish. Fortunately, they weren't quite ready when I got there, so I got to visit the Bean Museum, fulfilling my ritual of going down to see the common snipe in the basement every time I'm in Provo. Ah, Gallinago gallinago, may we meet again soon in the halls of Scolopacidae. I noticed something new this time, though: Anas discors, the blue-winged teal, sits on the same shelf as Anas cyanoptera, the cinnamon teal. Come on, guys. Get your acts together. Surely some tealologist somewhere speaks both English and Latin.

I was quite pleased at my lack of fatigue in hiking Mount Y. Evidently my win-back-Lacie treks weren't entirely fruitless. Granted, I'm used to hiking from Helaman, and we started at the trailhead, but still, I think I could have done it without any breaks, which is cool. The elements grew testy as we neared the Y, but Novel and Uffish finally convinced me to wear a Red Cross blanket as a cape, which was great fun, particularly as I ran down the mountain Batmanning (v, intr: to sport a billowing cape).

We got back in time for me to pick up Lizzy and head to the Brick Oven to catch up over a market room buffet. I'm glad Lizzy and I have stayed in touch; she's very good to me, and a wonderful conversationalist. It's kind of a pity I didn't see Shelley, now that I think about it. After that, I took Janssen to Ottavio's (ummm, so I was hungry Thursday, okay?), which is probably my favorite restaurant in the world. I mean, the Brick Oven has a ton of sentimental value, but Ottavio's equals it in tasty and pretty value. We ended up with a sampler of ravioli, lasagna, fettucine alfredo, and chicken parmigiana, all of which were simply divine, though we had very little room after the salad and the bread and vinegar.

Sherry needed to go ring shopping at Wilson Diamonds, so I took them over, figuring that any time is a good time to seethe to myself about African blood money, mock materialistic girls quoted in BYU directory advertisements, and fend off salespeople with moissanite crosses. However, after sitting in the store for about twenty minutes without any assaults on my credit card, my heart rather softened. I paged through their brochures, finding that not a one screamed for attention; on the contrary, they calmly and clearly explained the international guidelines for diamond quality and pointed out a few of the special services Wilson Diamonds offers. Indeed, they seem rather defined by this quote:

"Some people are so impressed with our site that they fly in for the weekend to buy a ring. This may sound a bit drastic. However, depending on how far away you are, and how much you're planning to spend, it can be well worth it to make non-Utah wages and spend them with Utah prices!

"In any case, give us a call. And also...no matter where you end up buying, read over Tips for Buying Over the Internet below. Good luck! I hope she loves her diamond!"

Quite *not* the attitude I expected, a diamond merchant surprised to find himself so successful just because he's honest and sincere. If my future wife demands more than moissanite's 9.25 on the Moh scale, it'll be Wilson Diamonds all the way for me. In truth, my tongue is firmly in cheek; I'm sufficiently disenchanted with my past reactionary nonconformity that it seems perfectly reasonable to pay ten times as much for reduced sparkle and luster. However, I'm very serious in my endorsement of Wilson's. I mean, this is how cool they are: I see a sign over one of the cases saying "Browsers Welcome" and smirk to myself, "Wonder if that includes Firefox." Looking closer, I realize that the pun was intentional; the sign advertised their website. Have a gander, if only to enjoy the googol or two of proposal ideas they have listed.

Uffish is elbowing me to finish, so I'll try to cruise through the rest. Okay, that's a lie. Expect tangents galore. But I'll try to take fewer breaks to start blue-beta threads.

Rounding out St. Patrick's day, Ambrosia invited me to a get-together at La Querida's. I arrived a little early, so I pulled a Foster, wandering around the neighborhood and accompanying park in the most pleasant-looking direction until one spot stuck and I sat in meditation and prayer for fifteen minutes. Highly recommended, that. There were a ton of Poetasters there, so we all wrote limericks. I came up with the following, certainly nothing novel, but amusing to me:

For every beast, there's an home,
From the snake living under a stone
To the Cougar's dark den
And if he's wise, then
After midnight, he'll be in his own.

It was mildly awkward, but everyone was quite nice, and La Querida had prepared rather tasty soda bread. Oh, I got to meet Melyngoch, too, which was one of my major objectives, what with her awesomehood. I expected from her writing someone short, but was pleasantly surprised to find her quite comely. Of course, it goes without saying that I loved seeing 'Brozy again, particularly because of her frankness with me about the BYUSA situation.

Friday was actually kind of blowy. I spent most of the morning writing a save-the-Board letter, then kind of killed time until I picked up my old FHE mom at three and drove her home. Didn't even really get to talk to Foster. I adore Mom, of course, but it was kind of disappointing seeing how little I had to talk about with her and the old FHE sisters. Online conversations die much more peacefully. In Braden end-the-conversation panic mode, I asked them what their plans were for the evening, learned they were going out to dinner, and invited myself, then left.

I'd been hoping to have dinner with Trevor, but between the FHE girls and Jassa inviting me to meet Bart, it didn't so much happen. Eh. We talk online quite frequently, and dinner Wednesday was nice, so it's not too disheartening. I headed over to the topless girls' and hung out for a bit waiting for Bart to arrive, which gave me an opportunity to sort of meet Sherry's fiance, Eric. Not the kind of guy I'd be friends with, but a good guy, and they certainly make a cute couple. Having corresponded with Bart on LiveJournal, I found him the same fellow I know and love, if slightly more three-dimensional. Congratulations again, you two. I guess it's supposed to be weird having two of my friends getting married, but it really feels quite natural; if anything, I was surprised by how content and mature Sherry looked with Eric, like Uncle Jason and Aunt Kim a few years ago. I expect them both to handle marriage exceptionally well.

I ate quickly at an imitation Cafe Rio in Fat Cats, then hopped back in the car and headed down to Uffish's bookstore to hook up with the Board girls. Unable to spy it out when I arrived, I called to learn they'd already left for DI. I confirmed that it was on University, then headed up University Ave. until city limits, turned around, and took University Parkway to University Mall before realizing that it's, in fact, on State Street. By the time I arrived, they'd finished up there, too, so I decided to stop trying to crash their girls' night out and instead crashed on one of the recliners for a few hours' napping.

Happily, it allowed me a chance to hang out with Heather. We chanced upon one another online, and after a few moments' griping, I came to my senses and asked her out for ice cream at the CONE. As I've done before, I bought brownies at the register, after which we took them to the grill and got exceptionally tasty sundaes. I'm quite glad we got to catch up; I'm very fond of the girl, but it had seemed rude making plans with one topless girl when I didn't have time to hang out with all of them individually. (Janssen transcends barriers of protocol.)

I left the next morning around 12:15, stopping to spend my last $7 on gas in some ridiculous little town without credit-card pumps. With a lot of coasting in neutral and even more prayer, I somehow made it through Highway 20 on those few gallons and filled up in Panguitch. Southern Utah was upon me, and I spent about three hours singing "On The Road Again" to distract myself from grief as my surroundings grew more and more barren. Darkness fell shortly before Flagstaff, and soon rain tumbled down alongside. I checked my windshield wipers, reassuring myself that they're still in such horrible condition as to actually make it *more* difficult to see, and pressed onward through fog and spray. Somehow or another, I forestalled burial with Geneva, and my gas lasted me all the way back to Phoenix.

I'd decided to stay at my apartment Saturday night, however, so directions were a bit different. Hopping on the 101, I saw a Scottsdale Rd. exit and thought to myself, "Hey! I live on Scottsdale! I'm almost home!" Nope. Check out Mapquest.com's map of my travels. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a "find stupidest route" option, so you can't see my actual path straight south from start to finish, neglecting to consider the fact that Scottsdale is a thriving metropolis with Scottsdale Rd. as basically an intracivic freeway, only with thousands and thousands of people motoring along at a frantic crawl to reach the hundreds of glittering retail outlets lining the roadway. Not a good call, friend.

I finally reached home, though, and shoved a pizza in the oven to collapse in Grant's recliner and consider my travels. In particular, to think about how much I'd enjoyed meeting everyone, from the Pakistanis to Wiggle. Bamabeau and I hit it off very quickly, being old comrades-in-arms in the rebellion against the captain, beside the fact that he's just a great guy. Novel is, previously unbeknownst to me, an splendid old friend, and Uffish is kind of intimidatingly difficult to read, but more than makes up for it in friendliness, cleverness, and easiness on the eyes.

Smurfs and TO get their own paragraph, 'cause they like being talked about, and I'm very happy to oblige. They both kind of surprised me. No, I'm not going to say that TO surprised me by his goofiness; while it may be true, it's as meaningless as Noah noting that the flood was unexpectedly moist. In fact, I found myself most caught off guard by how cool they were; where I anticipated Bubble Boys I found Otters. I guess a certain maturity and polishedness are to be expected of RMs, but I was still very impressed by how well they merge respectability with playfulness.

Ambrosia, however, was quite what I remembered, happily, her own sweet, brilliant self. She and Smurfs are good to me beyond any reason; it's like having older siblings without the early-childhood abuse. Being somewhat introverted, I terribly appreciated how they each made me feel like I was in a one-on-one conversation in the midst of group activity, particularly as I conversed with Boarders and Poetasters and felt middlingly intelligent and very lacking in wit. I mean that not self-disparagingly; I doubt any but Divine Comedy devotees could beat Boarders in banter.

Nor do I imply that they were unwelcoming. Quite contrarily, I was touched by how kind they all were, how quick they were to pull bawb into their circle of friends, though he's asked but half a dozen questions to the Board and blogged but a month. Never have I felt so at home so quickly, and I thank each of you for that. It was as though, in Disney's Hercules' words, the crowds cheered when they saw my face, and a voice kept saying, "This is where I'm meant to be." Yeah, so even I'm laughing at my own silly sappiness. Nonetheless. Fall semester's going to be a blast.

On that happy note, I'll post this. I'll try to catch up all the way by tomorrow night.