maybe I should corblimey them instead

Mmmkay, nothing is happening anywhere online. Time for more comment-whoring. I suppose I should be satisfied, having garnered five comments, a Jassa comment, and half an entry in response to my last entry, but nope. Horrible people doing non-internet things on Friday night. [It took me a full day to write this.] Thanks, though, commenters. Those who would accuse me of being a sucker for attention, I readily admit it; heck, I'm touched by compliments from computer-controlled allies in Halo.

Oh, one amazingly awesome thing I forgot: when one of Foster's students asked who I was, he guessed that I'd gone down to AZ for grad school. Yeah. I'm so cool.

Krystal came over Saturday night after I got home. I was rather bitter about it, but she seemed to enjoy watching the copy of Best Two Years I got for Christmas. Hopefully her utils were within an order of magnitude of my dolors from exhaustion the next morning. Goodness my lesson blew. I'm just like, "Yeah, so this is kind of a cool point to consider. Any ideas? Ummm, right. Oookay. Amen." I blessed the Sacrament, though, a nice change of pace.

Jason came over to Dad's place for spaghetti, but I had to dash out quickly, Krystal having called me halfway through the meal to invite me to walk around at the temple. The MTC had mailed down the photos that I'd sent in for development before I left, so I sat on the grounds for a moment to enjoy seeing my old district again. Krystal eventually found me, and we meandered into the Visitor's Center to hear that they were presenting Testaments. There were no fun French headphones this time, so I decided to really focus on the movie's message, on giving myself over to pathos and peace.

The last two weeks had been rather tumultuous. I'd terribly enjoyed much of it, of course, but on three separate occasions, I'd extended myself in energetic concern or fondness and perceived only apathy in return, each time becoming rather seriously upset. Finally, on my drive home, I planned out an entry entitled "never be normal like you" to express my frustration, ranting about how no matter what I did, my life continually spiralled back to self-pity and self-loathing, time after time; how the littlest setbacks break me, and even if they aren't ruinous, by the time I finish my tantrum, they've become so. It simmered down from Friday to Sunday, though, from despair into irritation, and as I watched the movie, it finally drained away.

In particular, it was when Christ said, "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted." I've always kind of blown off such things, you know, the Ensign messages about finding peace in life and such, because I have an hard time relating to most people's emotional struggles. First off, I have virtually no fear; when living in Heritage over the summer, I noticed that my roommate would include in every prayer a plea to "keep us safe," and I can find no trace of that in myself. Likewise, I've never had a spouse die, never been poor, never been mocked for my faith; I've never felt entitled to plead Gilead's balm.

Another time over the summer, I volunteered an answer in Elder's Quorum about Enos, and the teacher asked a leading question basically inviting me to bear my testimony of the benefits of the Atonement. I stammered something about how wonderful it is to know Christ knows all our trials, and I've long regretted my lack of sincerity in that declaration. At that moment during the movie, though, I suddenly longed for that solace; finally I admitted that, though my sorrows may be quite distinct from the average saint's, while they may be hurricanes stirred by butterflies, while even I can see I'm being ridiculous, it is neither too big nor too small for the peaceful potency of the Comforter. The rest of the movie was similarly powerful as I continued to suspend cynicism; my willingness to give myself over to emotion greatly encreased.

Grant and I had an awesome talk that night. I was planning on describing it in detail, but a lot of it was about Bradenian grammar, and after trying a second time to teach Uffish Bradenian, I've realized that it's virtually impossible to describe it to non-native speakers. I mean, Lacie and a few of the roommates learned a fair bit by immersion, but we're now working on advanced grammar, which doesn't really make sense without an elementary exposure. For any who are curious, though, the recent changes are illustrated well by the following translation:

"My dear Braden, you wouldn't have had to give it to me if you hadn't played with it."
"Praejtna hwoutn'ta hassa teffsa kiffsalama iffa plaejssn'tala."

One fun, easy-to-understand change, though, is modified names, as illustrated by "Praejtna." I mean, affectionate names are very well precedented ("Chassa," "Keffa," "Nufsha"), so it was just a matter of formalization, but Grant's also created perjorative names with a "ka" suffix (e.g. "Harriple keffka killssama alltimes"). And yes, I understand that it sounds retarded. Nonetheless, it's unbelievably powerful as a language of emotion and humor.

As its antipode, in discussing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, we discovered Lojban, an ideal language of logic and reason. Scope the link; it's really quite cool. Unfortunately, there are only a dozen fluent speakers worldwide, but it's just as useful for individual linguistic research and computation as global communication, so hopefully Grant and I can learn it after we finish with Sanskrit and Norse.

Other random linguistic observations: I use an unvoiced "th" in "mouths," just like the "knife"/"knives" shift. Not sure if that's standard. Also, I heard someone at the pulpit the other week pronounce "x" strangely, and realized that there's actually a voiced/unvoiced allophone pair, selected by whether it's followed by a consonant or a vowel (e.g. "exact"/"excrete"). I almost wish I hadn't noticed; it'll take a while to train myself to say "ecssact" in Bradenian. I've gotten to the point where even a voiced "the" seems natural, though.

Monday was awesome. I wore my yellow shirt, and in appropriate Peircean auspiciousness, a totally hot girl smiled at me. Like, seriously hot. Looked kind of like Satan's version of Jassa. Tuesday, we went to see Hitch with Krystal, which was pretty amusing. It seemed a little ridiculous, however, to pay money to see the lead actress when I could have gotten the same unpredictability, manipulativeness, and pretense of aversion to relationships just calling Geneva for free. Seriously, though, the movie was essentially a tutorial in courting Geneva; I should rent it and watch it fifty times until I learn how to talk for hours about nothing meaningful and we live happily ever after. Wednesday, I tried to go to a missionary committee meeting at Mike's house, but ended up forty-five minutes late from not properly understanding how far away his house is. Mesa people, he lives out past *McDowell and Power*. Utah people, my house is in the same relation to that location as, say, Provo is in relation to Maine. Like, he's so far out there that *orange farmers* couldn't deal with the isolation.

The rest of the week's been nicely boring. I've played a fair bit of one-on-one Halo with k_t. I've almost caught up to him in skill level, so it's pretty fun. I finally made myself go to differential equations, and happily, the midterm isn't until next Wednesday, so I don't think my month-long absence will end up killing me. Hurrah for *not* pulling another predicate logic. Also, I got a 94 on the grammar test, which is tolerable considering that I haven't been to class in weeks, couldn't find my book, and caught up on three chapters in half an hour before the test, sitting on the floor of the bookstore. Honestly, though, I'm a little disappointed, because I totally missed the concept of a finite verb in cramming (yeah, I know, it should be obvious), so my grade is more a reflection of her kindness than my excellence.

Time to wrap this up and post; I gotta get up and prepare a lesson tomorrow, and this is pretty long anyway. I'll include the random rants I've outlined in my next entry. I'm over at Dad's house tonight, which has been nice, what with seeing my paternal grandparents and getting Easter candy and such. We had a good Gospel discussion, in which my father reminded me how cool he's been about theological study of late. Excellent quote from him: "It's not a degree of glory and two degrees of damnation. It's three degrees of glory, and they're all salvation."

In conclusion, obligatory obscure rambling: I suppose I should be disappointed about this. Conversations with Grant always make things seem much better, though, and my hopes are pretty dang hard to crush, particularly after wrapping things up at five in the morning. Life rocks.