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Sunday, September 28th, 2008
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3:15 am - The relevant backstory
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Just stepped outside and smelled a certain plant I haven't caught a whiff of in a while. Guess I'm back on campus.
So I'm living in a group of 7 males, in two adjacent apartments on the third floor of the apartment building on campus. Five of us are LDS, which is really nice. On the basic value level - what's allowed in the apartment - it's obviously nice; no smoking/drinking/sex is the unspoken guideline. People are always going to church or to church activities, or having church friends over for dinner - oh yeah, we eat dinner together, which is awesome. And it's really helping me prepare to serve a mission; all of my LDS roomies are returned missionaries. (That's another topic in its own right and will get a post soon. Partially just to clear my thinking.)
So this is the background against which the dating drama occurs. Plus in terms of sheer numbers the whole scene is pretty incestuous; there are like four other active, non-married/engaged LDS undergraduates on campus; two are freshman and two just got back from their mission. There's some outside dating of course, but the core group is maybe 25 active LDS undergraduates on campus at any one time, including taken people. And the undergraduate community is only partly integrated with the rest of the ward.
This means that, in economic terms, we pretty much have a corner on the undergraduate LDS female dating market. And as any econ 1 student knows, cartels get formed because the partners can divide higher, monopoly profits, between them,
How much of the previous part was consciously in the mind of my roommates. But I do know that when I walked into the next-door apartment, my mega-dater roomie Jon was scrolling through his iPhone, reading off girls' names so people could call dibs on first dates with girls.
Finding this somewhere between brilliant and really distasteful, I snapped up dibs on a couple. Later I decided I wasn't interested in one of them (we didn't hit it off, and Jon is interested in her) but I was interested in Kendra, who I hadn't called dibs on. So I called her and asked her out. I might ask her out on a second date, but I think I'll ask out a couple other girls on first dates first. I'm interested in Kendra - we hit it off - but not really really interested atm, and I don't want to just pursue the first option that falls into my hands.
So, calling dibs on common friends: okay? Definitely not okay? Only okay for first dates?
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(2 Red Barchettas | run like the wind (as excitement shivers up and down my spine) )
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| Saturday, August 9th, 2008
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9:05 pm - Two degrees of separation
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Rachel and I were watching the Olympic opening ceremonies on tape when Rachel opened online standings to see who had won medals. The US was up, with three medals from fencing. I was like - fencing? I was pretty good friends freshman year with Eva Jellison, a chill, friendly freckled redhead from Massachusetts who lived down the hall from me. She also happened to be one of the top female American fencers.
Discussing the possibility of going to Beijing once, Eva said she didn't really think she was up for Olympic training and stuff. We were all incredulous that this normal person who we were all good friends with, was discussing the possibility so nonchalantly.
We haven't kept in touch that much, and I don't think Eva seriously tried out, but I do remember her talking freshman year about the tournaments she went to, and her perpetual rivalry with a Mariel who went to Notre Dame. I looked at the medals, and there it is - Mariel Zagunis, United States, gold medal, fencing.
Weird.
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(2 Red Barchettas | run like the wind (as excitement shivers up and down my spine) )
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| Saturday, July 5th, 2008
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10:17 pm - "deep water faith in the shallow end"
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that line is from the Counting Crows song "Caught in the Middle" which I'm feeling a lot now.
went out tracting with the missionaries Tuesday....
knocking on doors with them for a couple hours at night. A few things I noticed.
- a couple people said something along the lines of "No thanks, I'm saved already."
Maybe that just came out wrong, but that sort of mindset ("you can know you're saved" in the words of a preacher I flipped to on the radio) just seems strange to me.
If the people think the only criteria for being saved is believing, I think they're defying common sense - would any reasonably competent parent or boss judge solely on such a criteria?
Alternately, if you think that the belief to be 'saved' must imply a change of heart and/or attitudes towards other people as well - aren't you being a bit arrogant in saying the degree to which you've done so meets God's standards? (Notice I avoid saying 'works')
- it was sort of interesting the way the three of us conducted conversations. Probably sort of like the way hotel maids watch TV shows while cleaning: come in, turn on the TV, move to the next room, turn on the same channel there. We'd be carrying on conversations about a couple things, in between doors we rang the bells of. We ended up handing out some literature as well as one Book of Mormon. Apparently that's pretty good.
- The missionaries seemed ridiculously upbeat about what seemed largely a futile work, getting turned away at door after door.
- The missionaries seemed at times tone deaf to the fact that people didn't want to listen to them, or would be okay with taking literature but didn't want to hear more. Maybe this is calculated to some degree, but I thought it was counterproductive at a couple of points.
- It made the thought of knocking doors for two years seem less foreign. After the weird factor at door number one, it was just like, well we're tracting, this is what we do.
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(run like the wind (as excitement shivers up and down my spine) )
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| Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
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9:54 pm - I love technology and the market system
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I’ve been listening to this really awesome internet radio station called Gospel Grass.
That might only seem slightly strange, but consider:
A half-Indian Mormon convert whose grandfather was a famous publisher of Marathi literature is learning about and loving the music a group of evangelical Christians raised in rural Appalachia, on a service designed by probably nonreligious Silicon Valley technogeeks.
I heart the cash nexus. And cultural nexi, too.
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(1 Red Barchetta | run like the wind (as excitement shivers up and down my spine) )
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| Saturday, February 16th, 2008
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9:36 am
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I’m currently reading Adam Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” and will be posting thoughts and reflections.
Smith’s primary thesis is that sympathy is the cornerstone of our moral behaviour, the key from which all else flows.
But because sympathy will never be complete, our desires for what we might call authenticity can never be completely fulfilled.
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(4 Red Barchettas | run like the wind (as excitement shivers up and down my spine) )
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| Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
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3:19 pm
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| Sunday, October 7th, 2007
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10:40 am - Utter. Madness.
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| Thursday, September 27th, 2007
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11:02 pm
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| Friday, September 21st, 2007
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6:39 am
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| Saturday, September 1st, 2007
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5:41 pm - wow
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I almost got run over about half an hour ago.
I was walking across the street, with the light, and I saw a large white van completing a right turn directly into me. My memory of the details is sort of gone, shell shock I guess, but I remember first freezing in place and then darting forward. No thinking, just acting.
The image of that van staring me down, 10 or 20 feet away, is burned into my memory.
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(1 Red Barchetta | run like the wind (as excitement shivers up and down my spine) )
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| Wednesday, August 29th, 2007
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8:46 pm
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Staying n Chicago now with my cousim Vaibhav and his wife Sonali. Arrangements are sort of interesting - they have a studo apartment, so I'm staying in the same room with the two of them. Odd...(I offered to sleep in the walk-in closet, but they said it wouldn't be necessary)
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(run like the wind (as excitement shivers up and down my spine) )
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| Friday, June 1st, 2007
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5:52 am - statistics on Sam's life
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Night slept out of last four: 4
Nights slept on my own bed: 1
Nights slept on the Daily couch: 1
Nights slept in the Potter computer cluster: 2
Total hours of nighttime sleep over four days: 16
Hours slept during class, last four days: ~2
Stories written: 2
Nights editing at the office (4 hours/night): 2
Tests taken: 2
12-page papers to continue writing: 1
Problem sets due: 2
Problem sets due today that I'm turning in on Monday because I haven't started: 1
Last three times I've seen Joseph:
-3:50 am Friday, Potter bathroom
-8pm Thursday, Daily office
-6am Thursday, our room. I had gotten up to work and he had just gotten back from Terman.
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(run like the wind (as excitement shivers up and down my spine) )
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| Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
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5:34 pm - interesting excerpt
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found this gem in Speaker for the Dead, thought I'd post it:
A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to sttone her to death. (There is a familiar version of the story, but a friend of mine, a Speaker for the Dead. has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones that I'm going to tell you.)
( story )
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(1 Red Barchetta | run like the wind (as excitement shivers up and down my spine) )
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| Tuesday, April 17th, 2007
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8:02 pm
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| Saturday, February 10th, 2007
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10:54 am - all systems tend towards equilibrium
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sleep recently:
wednesday night: 4:30 am to 7:30 am on the Daily couch, a bit during the day
thursday night: 6:30 am to 11:30 am
friday night: 7:30 pm to 12:15 am, 1:00 am to 9:30 am
(3 + 0.5 + 5 + 13.25)/3 = 21.75/3 = 7.25 hours a night.
I really have been busy..now, must write two features stories (on a Nobel laureate and the world editor of TIME, both of whom I interviewed - I love The Stanford Daily) and a 9-page draft by Monday night. Onwards!
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(run like the wind (as excitement shivers up and down my spine) )
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| Thursday, December 14th, 2006
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8:17 am - John Galt is going on strike
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link Most of the workers cleaning up and tearing down a skyscraper that was damaged during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks walked off the job in a contract dispute one day after the long-awaited teardown of the building began, officials said.....Some of the John Galt Co. employees left work at the former Deutsche Bank AG building Monday,
amused :)
current mood:  amused
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(run like the wind (as excitement shivers up and down my spine) )
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| Sunday, December 3rd, 2006
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7:02 pm - interesting
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In the (imho) unlikely event the Second Coming occurs sometime soon and Christians want to say one last thing to their unbaptized brethren, there is "The Postal Service of the Saved":
"Just write your letter and it will be hand-delivered immediately following the exodus of the pure from the Earth. But you must be thinking to yourself, "How can the letters be delivered after the Rapture?" The answer is simple. The creators of this site are Atheists. That's right, we don't believe in God. How else would we be able to deliver your correspondence after the Rapture?"
(via MarginalRevolution)
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(3 Red Barchettas | run like the wind (as excitement shivers up and down my spine) )
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| Friday, October 27th, 2006
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11:59 am
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| Sunday, October 22nd, 2006
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10:34 pm - Sam is bored
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I'm doing a problem set in which we have to summarize in 500 words - not critically analyze, just summarize - a sppech of Milton Friedman's. I thought using that many words to just summarize something was a waste of my time, so I decided to have a bit of fun. Here's my first paragraph:
"Any fan of the book/movie Requiem for a Dream who subsequently reads Milton Friedman’s 1967 speech “The Role of Monetary Policy” should immediately be struck by their similarity. Hubert Selby Jr., in his pathos-filled masterpiece, portrays a woman, Sara Goldfarb, becoming addicted to methamphetamines. Though originally she enjoys the experience, we see her forced to double, triple, and quadruple her original dosage to maintain her original artificial high. As a result, she eventually suffers a complete mental and physical breakdown. Milton Friedman in this speech describes monetary policy in parallel if less graphic terms."
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(6 Red Barchettas | run like the wind (as excitement shivers up and down my spine) )
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| Friday, October 20th, 2006
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8:57 pm
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I'm going to a Civilization board game party tomorrow. Yeah, apparently the computer game was based on a board game. It should be SWEET.
Also, Laga, one of the first-graders at the school that I teach at after school, just got a cell phone. It's kind of bizarre seeing a six-year-old with a cellphone, not least because it's about as big as her hand.
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(5 Red Barchettas | run like the wind (as excitement shivers up and down my spine) )
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