things I do during general conference (then and now) (WITH PICTURES!)

General Conference is a magical time of year, second and third only to the magic of Christmas (because it happens twice in the year). It’s a semi-annual broadcast put on by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (my particular religious denomination). The broadcast is broken up into four 2-hour sessions divided equally over the first Saturday and Sunday in April and October. The presidency and other officers of the LDS Church use this time to deliver messages on good Christian moral things: nothing more or less than what we would hear in local Sunday meetings, but for this one weekend, we get to veg out in fleecy pajama pants and blankets and virtually attend over the Internet or with cable (BYUtv).

Now, plenty of other Church members are going to blog about the content of the talks, critiquing every consonant that slips past the tongue of any and all speakers.  But, I’m not going to talk about those things because, in a nutshell, I really do not care. All I know is, when I listen to General Conference, I feel inspired and enlightened and awesome. And more importantly, it’s one of those constants in my life. Even though a lot has changed over the years–my residence, my job, my relationships, my school–I always have time to veg out for a session or two of Conference weekend. What started as a family ritual I was required to participate in under penalty of severe lecture has become an enjoyable personal tradition.

So with that somewhat lengthy intro, I present to you the things that make Conference Weekend not just any other weekend.

1. THEN: Play “bingo” for specific topics and words that are mentioned in the talks, using for tokens an abundance of raisins, Cheerios, and mini-marshmallows to snack on for two hours at a time (especially the mini-marshmallows. If you eat mini-marshmallows for even just a half-hour, the insides of your mouth slowly turn into a kind of puffy dust-covered chamber, your gums absorbing the texture of the marshmallows until they too are a kind of mother marshmallow).

NOW: fall asleep to the Tabernacle Choir’s aura of soothing zzzzz’s.

2. THEN: Studiously listen to every conference talk and write down what I said so I could at least try to contribute to the inevitable discussion afterwards with my parents. So, y’know, they knew I was paying attention at least  half the time.

NOW: Selectively listen to the stuff that actually grabs my attention, and save my thoughts for blog posts and missionary letters.

3. THEN: Eat cinnamon rolls for breakfast. This was seriously just about the only time of year we ate cinnamon rolls at my house. It was splendid.

NOW: Eat cinnamon rolls for breakfast, are you kidding me!? In college, we’re showered with an overabundance of free pizza but there’s never, ever enough cinnamon rolls to go around.

 

How was your Conference weekend?

on things that make me feel like an adult.

1. Getting to sign up/apply for anything with a “must be 18 or over” qualifier.

2. Getting to sign up for anything that requires me to be 18 or over without having to change my birth year.

3. Choosing to still use a fake birth year for privacy reasons anyways.

4. I have to use Outlook for my work email, which is shocking to me, being raised on Macs and the generation of Gmail.

5. I have a work email address in the first place.

6. Being able to say “yes.”

7. Being able to say “no.”

8. Understanding that my mistakes have greater repercussions.

9. Feeling like my successes mean more.

10. NOT writing blog posts that contemplate whatever stage of life I may or may not exist in.

the field guide to Despicable Me 2’s Minion Rush: a comic about a video game for your phone

 

I know I totally misspelled “balloon” up there.

behold, the worst picture I have ever drawn or will ever draw again.

I didn’t notice how off her arms were until a good 6 hours later after I had already posted it on social media. Sometimes you just gotta laugh at the little stupid things you overlook. By the way, this is Aoi Asahina, a character from a PSP Japanese visual novel and now anime called Dangan Ronpa. Highly recommend watching if you like murder mysteries.

on things I can draw.

Today was the first sketchbook group meeting, We made two rules: no criticism, however constructive, will be given unsolicited, and most importantly just be creative and be yourself. I think the no-criticism rule should be extended to apply to our own inner critics.

This got me thinking about art, and talent, and creativity, and the universe, and stars, and rainbows, and cupcakes, and how I really need to start the mac-&-cheese going or I’m gonna be grumpy in an hour.

Ultimately, there are only two types of art for me: the stuff I do for a grade, and the stuff I do for me.

things I can draw for a grade:

1. a GIF of a frisbee wallowing in its own India ink.
2. apparently this faceless self-portrait I assembled in thirty minutes but got picked for the student art show all the same. It doesn’t have a face because “it reflects my self-perceived lack of uniqueness and loss of identity in the art world” but mostly because I hate drawing faces. Any lack of skill can be justified with an eloquent thematic excuse.
3. studies with Color-Aid collage paper cut and pasted (in the real world!) into a sketchbook that will make its way into the trash in a month or two.

Kind of esoteric, right? And I only have B’s in the classes I’ve taken so far for my visual arts minor–again, I don’t have a chance against the actual art majors who live and breathe the cookies-n-cream fragrance of Gesso. But while I tend to express myself through writing (my preferred form of creativity), I still tend to learn visually, through art. So to combat the negative feelings I got from my B’s, I started trying to find “the art” in the things I already liked to do.

things I draw for me:

1. flat people with rocks for hands and shoes and expressive angles for eyebrows.
2. self-portrait as seen in the Adventure Time princess maker!
3. Hello Kitty stamps bordering college-ruled snail mail to friends.
4. virtual paper snowflakes? for whenever my finger muscles are too weak to cut through the really heavy paper with a bad pair of kiddie scissors.
5. Instagram-filtered photos. There IS a science and possibly an art to knowing which filters bring out the best in your photo, whether or not to use high contrast or hard focus, and when it’s just best to publish as-is.
6. the way I arrange the Ikea hexagon mirrors on the bedroom wall.
7. well-timed screenshots of Steam games.
8. color scheme on a website or for a logo.
9. funky block lettering in pen.
10. cosplay assembly.

I would never want these things on display in a museum, much less my professional portfolio, but they’re far more beautiful and useful to me than that silly self-portrait from the exhibit buried in my closet. My friends don’t think I’m Van Gogh, but I know they laugh and smile at the way I try to do comic strips about them. My little sisters squee over letters covered in funny stickers. The Ikea mirrors are the most efficiently placed in my apartment for doing a quick make-up check before I head out.

I’m proud to be a visual arts minor if it means I get to enjoy these little “minor” pleasures of art in life, while continuing to explore the form of creativity that lets me be myself the best, without judgement.

on 10 fantastical projects for the upcoming warm months in the middle of the calendar year.

1. Get a better-paying job. Right now I do menial labor in the food service industry.
2. Go to Portland for the excuse to visit my old roommate.
3. Do classes for my major/work in Adlab (BYU’s student-run ad agency).
4. Fourth thing.
5. Go to San Francisco whenever Google decides to get back to me on Project Stop Pronouncing It Like Glasses Because That’s Not The Brand Name People Get It Right.
6. Start a Let’s Play series for my little baby siblings who live 1300 miles away… *sniffles*
7. Convert Transcending Pixels (my old casual game review blog) into a webcomic.
8. *starts crying*
9. *more crying*
10. Go visit my little siblings and family before the semester starts again.

on the meaning of life on pi day.

1. Pop in pizza.

2. Frisbee.

3. Realize I miss home.

4. Dance.

5. Try to practice off-book.

6. Splatter painted scissors like a preschooler on everyone’s Stonehenge.

7. Love sunshine.

8. Time isn’t happening, just slow walking.

9. Check Twitter: distracted by dude.

10. Wake up now.

what sex ed is like when you’re six.

I had just stopped at yet another destination in the Wisconsin Classic Tour* and I still didn’t have any friends except my sister and myself so the world was pretty much alright still. We were casually checking out the sophisticated downtown culture, and we noticed a black sign with a silhouetted girl in a tutu frock and stylish high heels kicking up one of her legs at an arabesque.

Golddiggers. Lakeshore’s Finest Adult Entertainment.

I was six-and-a-half years old.

“Look mommy, it’s a ballet studio!” I screamed. Maybe I could finally make up for that one horrible recital last year when I couldn’t find my place on the stage with the other girls and spent the whole time trying not to cry as I shuffled around helplessly. I could perfect the art of dancing and be like the photos of Russian ballerinas in the book–

“That’s not a ballet studio sweetie,” mommy said, laughing a little.

I pondered that word. Golddiggers. People digging gold. I thought about the stories I’d heard of Alaskan settlers in the eighteen-hundreds looking to try their luck panning tirelessly day after day in pitiful streams looking for little nuggets of gold, far and few though they appeared. Prizing it, hoarding it, lusting after it.

I pondered that word. Adult. I hadn’t really noticed it before. Grown-ups, doing grown-up things. What did grown-ups really do anyway? There were things I felt were in the dark hidden from me, things like the way mommy laughed when she told me nicely that it wasn’t a ballet studio, things like “when you’re older,” things like the scary-looking signs of bars and even the Golddiggers sign after a few more trips past it that scared me a little inside wondering why it exuded suspicion. People at church always told me I was so “grown-up” the way I walked down the hallways with arms folded taking tiny steps raising my hand before speaking in Sunday School. Being grown-up was cute. But being an adult was big. Too big. 

I pondered that word. Entertainment. My exposure to that word came in the form of commercials on Disney VHS tapes before the movies started, promising “entertainment” and the way the man said it pronouncing the t’s hard with his teeth made me think of watching those very movies, playing loud board games, my family sitting on the couch and smiling with their teeth showing while we watched a funny video together. But this time, the very word itself was suspiciously lurking in the corner of the sign, hiding itself almost like it was ashamed of being there. I wondered if I should feel ashamed.

Golddiggers. Adult. Entertainment.

Brain cells clicked together and somehow they knew they should file the information away immediately so as to not trouble my little mind just then.

In the meantime though, I decided it was okay if I didn’t go to ballet studios anymore.

 

*aka the circuit of Wisconsinite dwellings I have taken up in the past two decades. Compare to: the Wisconsin Pro Tour, which consists of a careful all-hands-inside-the-vehicle ride through the Slums of Miller Walk Lee and/or driving endlessly through amber waves of grain and rundown barns with JESUS SAVES painted on in white lettering and saying “at least it’s not Illinois.”

Today is Donation Day at NaNoWriMo!

I voted for the OLLers to cover “Maneater” (Hall & Oates version) NaNo-style. Let’s see how this goes.

on “real blogging.”

What is a real blog?

Literally, it’s the shorthand for a web log. Your computer writes logs all the time: crash report logs, cookie logs. Sometimes these involve the web. Ergo, web logs. Ergo, blogs. Your computer writes blogs? Really?

I’m just being silly there. In fact, a real blog is a series of entries plastered on a virtual wall. This is something most people believe, and it is the reason they have so much trouble “keeping up” with writing “the blog.”

It starts with something like this… “Hey guys, I have a new blog! Come check it out!”

5 months later… “hey guys, I wrote a new blog post! Come check it out!”

7 months later… “hey guys, I have a new blog! I got sick of my old one and this one is gonna be updated multiple times a week with what’s up in my boring, pretentious life!”

And so forth.

In fact, if I’m not mistaken, The Oatmeal did a great comic on this that I can’t recall off the top of my head that basically makes fun of everyone who has ever done a “blog” in the past, as in the kind of blog that is really just an excuse for being a digitalized and completely public version of your very, very private journal. Most people don’t keep journals anymore, whether on a Word document they can spew all their l33sp34k into or just in a random spiral wide-ruled notebook–but who cares about a wide-ruled notebook when YOU COULD HAVE SPLASHY LAYOUT COLORS AND WIDGETS AND YOUR OWN DOMAIN (dot hosting service dot com). It makes you look like the hippest nerd ever and apparently looking like something is all that matters.

Thankfully, micro-blogging has come to the rescue in the form of social media, catering visual needs with Pinterest and Tumblr to text-only spews on Twitter to combinations of both written and visual “blog posts” on Facebook. People want to contribute content to the great World Wide of Web, but not all of them can blog “for reals.” So should they ever feel like venting about how stupid their crush is or how awesome the party was, heaven forbid they should feel confined to keeping these thoughts to themselves in a notebook! Why, all you need to do is find a couple of appropriate Ke$ha lyrics and bam, post! Publish! SCREAM so everyone can see how you feel right now!

Of course, if you were a REAL blogger, you would write a far more eloquent and lengthy discourse on the nature of infatuation as it relates to your current crush problems. Granted, nobody would read this, or post a comment unless they were already registered on your same hosting service. But at least it would make you look more intellectual.

Or would it? Is micro-blogging “real blogging”? If you wrote a post of the aforementioned description, assuming that it’s only for your own satisfaction of recording yourself, would you really feel any more satisfied than if you copied a few Ke$ha lyrics and made that your entry for the day? If you blogged nothing but animated GIFs of political debates on Tumblr, are you a blogger? Is that something you can list on your resume–that much-sought-after quality of “blogging” if you’re going for a white-collar creative-type position and all you have is a history of getting “likes” on Facebook every time you post a status? Or should that only be reserved for those elite with the self-owned domains who get at least thousands of hits every day and not because you’re posting slutty smutty stuff that always gets page hits anyway no matter who you are? 

I’m really tempted to make this post a long wall of philosophical musings on blogging-ception, but frankly, nobody likes reading those. Or writing those.