push every worthy work along

Man, I'm in such a bouncing-off-the-walls good mood this evening. Lisa, MissE, and Dad, thanks a ton for doing the usability survey. Definitely update time, before this entry-debt pushes me into bankruptcy. Let's see, I left off...a month ago? Slightly less? Sheesh. It was nice visiting my family, of course. Broke their trampoline on a particularly vigourous attempt at a knee flip.

...Yeah, chronological just isn't going to happen. It'd be sickeningly long anyway. Highlight time.

Life in general is awesome, event-wise. I usually can name about two things I've done at the end of each day, so it ought be easy to remember it all, but not so much. Fortunately, it's all rather cyclical, so I think I can do a decent...is there an English cognate of Fr. "raconter"? Reaccounting? Meh. Gross-sounding. A decent retelling by topic.

Church. Slept through it in Mesa, been going to Amanda Luthy's Sunday School since. She's a purple professional programmer, so I enjoyed talking to her about her horrible fate writing in Java and the tantalizing bits we've heard about Python. I found her lesson on the Second Coming particularly interesting; the consensus in the class seemed to be that we probably won't live to see it, which blew me away. I also raised an eyebrow at a question in the manual about how we can quell fears of the Second Coming. It was honestly totally alien to me; first, I imagine death by firey bloody hailstone to be pretty quick, and second, you're resurrected right afterward! Seriously, I see no glimmer of rationality in such fears, even without the whole blackish-green "I daily wish for death; how can you possibly fret about impending disaster?" Okay, sure, the right answer is "Be righteous so you'll be protected," but is pestilence in the ambiguous future really *that* much more motivating than inescapable damnation? {rolls eyes} Reds.

Speaking of which, I'm going to post the Hercules triangle I did for blue-beta a while back. No one really commented, but I think it's a fairly good example, and a concise way to explain Peircean theory.

---

Panic.....Phil....parents...Zeus
...Hercules...Pegasus...Fates
........Titans.....Megara
..............Hades

Yellow:
Firstness, potential, perception. Creativity, innocence, emotion, naivete. Children.
Pain and Panic. Inept minions, comic relief.

Red:
Secondness (existence in relation), conflict, fact. Competitiveness, practicality, strength, dominion. Business.
Titans, Hades. Wholly consumed with a desire for power, catalysts of conflict. Titans more mindless.

Blue:
Thirdness (existence in mediation), law, pattern. Goodness, unobtrusiveness. God.
Zeus, Fates. Centers of real power in the universe, sources of wisdom (the Fates for Hades; Zeus for Hercules), though never quite clear enough to resolve conflicts. Fates incarnations of blind, heartless justice.

Orange:
Firstness of secondness, perception of fact, potential for strength. Courage, likeability, ambivalence.
Hercules. Protagonist, center of attention; enormous strength, potential, and ambition without experience to control it.

Green:
Firstness of thirdness, perception of law, emotion of goodness. Mercy, theory, sloth.
Philoctetes, foster parents. Confused mentors dragged in against their wills. Philoctetes even deserts the action at one point.

Purple:
Secondness of thirdness, implementation of law, fact of goodness. Justice, decisiveness, heartlessness.
Megara. Judge of Hercules, object of his orange affection, initially very cynical. "I won't say I'm in love."

White:
Pegasus. Companion (personalization of law).

---

But yeah, the ward's good. Old, for the most part, but I really enjoyed my first Break the Fast; I met a fellow vegetarian and Perl enthusiast named Karla, and we spent about half an hour ranting about Microsoft. (She's five two. Reeaal funny, fate. Ha freaking ha.) I've been called as an FHE dad, which will be the death of me yet. Our first week consisted of me making fifty cupcakes for the eight people who showed up (none of whom took a cupcake as they came in), then bringing out a board game and trying to decipher the rules as the murmuring for orangeness crescendoed. (Word of advice: Password is the most excruciating board game imaginable. Essentially, imagine doing a word-association test with a psychologist who shouts "Wrong!" to each response. All competitiveness dies off as the teams realize they will have to work together in order for someone to score a point and end the game.)

I've been surprisingly involved, to my own mind. First, I gave a Sacrament meeting prayer, which closed with a brilliant Peircean invocation. ("And as we worship thee today, may we not only deepen in closeness to Thy Spirit [yellow] and love for fellow man [green], not only be strengthened in desire to do Thy will [red] and courage to stand for truth [purple], but above all, increase a little in holiness, grow a little in wisdom, become a little more, Father, like thee [blue, blue, blue].")

That Wednesday, I gave an Institute devotional on the Wikipedia article on the Three Witnesses and how, in bearing testimony, we too declare that we have heard the voice of God and hefted the fruits of the Church, though noting Acts 2:32 as setting a prior precedent for bearing testimony.

Since then, I've also gone home teaching, linking Elder Monson's article on peace in Christ, the article on helping those who mourn the loss of a loved one, and Karla's Sacrament meeting talk mentioning the broken hands on her replica of the Christus; and given an FHE thought tying together the Ensign story about turning off the radio and the first chapter in Screwtape Letters. Oh, and Sunday, the Elders' Quorum sang "High on a Mountain Top" for Sacrament meeting, and I was one of two first tenors. (Darin was the other, a very sharp fellow whom I disliked for being interested in the same girls as I until he complimented me on my Institute devotional.)

Other than that, it's mostly been playing Age of Empires (I'm getting beastlily good at the Mongols) and working on the PrinTeam website. Well, I've been really social, too, which is good. Ward prayer Sunday night, FHE Monday night, Poetasters/Peircean class Tuesday night, Institute Wednesday night, and some sort of party/date every weekend. I've also helped Trevor, Shoebox, and Lizzy move. So yeah, for not going to school or (formally) working, I stay pretty busy. Janssen and Bart, the dears, invited me to a movie the other week, and I was actually busy with other friends. (Thanks and sorry again, you two.)

Hum, so maybe I'll go over the last few days.

Saturday, I took out Liz Shorten, a new girl to the ward (green UVSC psych major, Orem native, 5'7"), which was kind of confusing. We went to Ottavio's, Episode III, and Ben and Jerry's, then came back to my apartment for card games with the roommates and Lizzy Burnett. I thought it went very well, particularly since I got to teach her Peircean theory, but I'm fairly sure she's been moderately avoiding me since. This would make sense if I'd gone out on a limb, but I asked her out because she was totally hitting on me at FHE the first night I met her. {shrugs} You win some; you lose some. I wish I'd lose fewer greens, but I guess I can't expect others to share my freakish same-color attraction.

Monday, our FHE group took up the Breims, our high council representatives, on their offer to host. Brad, my blue roommate, suggested that we invite another group, but the FHE coordinator shot it down. I reported as much to the Breims, who went behind my back to invite a different group, which led to an interesting "So, what's your group doing this week?" moment at ward prayer. I'm certainly not annoyed; I just mention it as an amusing example of ridiculous Mormon greenness. Seriously, directly asking me to bring more people to the event you are hosting would not be so unimaginable.

Okay, interruption. I have to list this ridiculous interlingual pun before I forget, or I'll drive myself crazy with reminders every time I think of it. I often remark to myself in thought, "Oui, ca, c'est vrai," agreeing with a good point I've made, to which I invariably respond "Ca severait de quoi?" to mock the momentary pause I insert before r's in every language. I'm pretty sure "sever" isn't actually a verb in French, and even if it is, only "se sever" would really make sense in context, but some part of me has decided that it's an Hilarious Joke and needs repeated constantly.

But anyway, the activity was great. A ton of people showed up, the food was fantastic, and it looked like everyone had fun. They even had veggie burgers, which we discovered to be amazing with their sweet corn-and-bean salsa, and the raspberry parfait for dessert was divine. It was a rather amazing to me looking around the table and realizing how many girls there are in the ward whom I'd consider dating. {counts on fingers} There's Meagan, a blue-green, French- and Latin-speaking logic TA; Karla, the aforementioned purple linguistics major and Perl enthusiast; Eve, an orange biochem major who has overcome my initial dislike; Angie, a blue-green MFHD redhead...hmmmm. In seriousness, Allison, the red-orange tree-scrabbling math ed major; Nisha, the yellow-yellow-green elem ed major; and Stephanie, the yellow-yellow-orange elem ed major, are all fairly silly prospects, but they're really comely. Still, though, four is pretty great, particularly in a ward with three girls per guy. On the other hand, broadening tastes beyond purple is a pretty sure way to improve one's odds.

After dinner, Allison invented some kind of turn-based trampoline dodgeball, and when it became clear I was the only one in attendance passionately anti-red enough (heh) to forbear, I grew rather grumpy and went to go watch the ants bury their dead. (I assume the Breims had recently laid poison.) Allison herself came over to visit, establishing me as not merely dysfunctional but a burden to society, so a crappy evening was fairly well-assured. My voices of scorn were overaggressive, though, and pushed so incessantly as to allow me to laugh at them, gaining enough of a toehold to advance a philosophical argument for the rationality of non-disinteestedly pursuing my own happiness. With that won, and C. S. Lewis' arguments that simple pleasures are laudable unto themselves bolstering my case, I ordered a pizza for myself and the roomies, and really, nothing can go wrong from that point.

Today was wholly consumed between helping Lizzy move and Poetasters. I met Thirdmango at the latter, which was a pleasant surprise. Nice guy. He brought a great poem on letters from the mission field, and Steve had penned a work of thematic and aesthetic brilliance. I mean, most of the poems are pleasant, but I purr to hear rhyming, metered poetry. Unfortunately, I left shortly before the stragglers decided to go to Wendy's, but Ambrosia's the only one among them with whom I treasure moments.

Helping Lizzy move was a pleasure, actually, and not just because we went to Applebee's and she's making me a loaf of bread. (Pssst, their Cowboy Burger is *amazing*.) For one, it is pleasant to know that I am not entirely useless in the male arts; while I grew very very very tired, I did an whole lot of work. (And with a third-story apartment, we're talking legitimate physics work.) Moreover, though, I adore Lizzy's company. Indeed, I hope to find a wife who shares many of her qualities; her matter-of-fact, smirking sense of humor is adorable, she's insightful and affectionate, and she draws out this yellow, almost orange childlike playfulness in me in which I rejoice. (On a more practical level, I quite admire a girl who's proud of nice furniture not because it was expensive but because it was cheap, and few can reckon the worth of one who decides to make bread to welcome her fiance to their new home after a long day of work.) Perhaps what I so enjoy in our relationship also keeps it platonic, in that puerility is hardly seductive, but I should hope (and indeed imagine) that, despite my countless wrong turns, she knows I can be counted on from lugging boxes and assembling fans to soberly discussing matters of import. Dunno. Tired. G'night.