when dishwashers attack!

Well, its been a couple weeks since my last/first post. I suppose I should write another one. Here's the 30 second version for those of you who dont really care about the details (which begs the question, why are you reading at all). I'm still unemployed, provo is awesome, my dishwasher exploded, school needs to start soon, angry birds is waaay to addicting, not all food is happy food, i want class to start now, and I'm still not married. That last one was really for my parents, its a pretty constant concern of theirs. I've made a few technical changes to my blog layout since my first post as well. The most noticeable being the background image of the jungles of ecuador, I'm proud to say I took it myself.

Also, I changed over to my new apartment at chatsworth, heres a couple of pictures of my new digs.

Heres my room its (mostly) unpacked now!

Mmmm k, so, I still dont have a job. Remember that interview I had before? It didnt work out, I couldnt get the materials to open that I had prepared for the interview and it was all down hill from there. When you are applying for a tech job, it is a bad sign if you cant even get your own program to open so I wasnt too surprised when I didnt get it but that means I have to start the whole process over again. One rejection email was particularly telling, it said something like, "we are sorry, but the position has been filled, we had over 80 applications". I mean geez, over 80? How am I going to compete with that? So my quest continues.

Luckily, this quest is going on in Provo, which means that even if I dont have a job, at least I always have something to do. Ammon has been between apartments the last few days and he has been staying with me at chatsworth until Dan shows up and that has been a lot of fun. Dan says hes getting in tonight but I'll believe it when I see it. I have other roommates here but they havent made much of an appearance so far. For some reason though, we dont have any dish soap in the apartment. We have every other cleaning supply, including dish soap that most people have sitting on the counter and that you arent supposed to use in the dishwasher. But not the detergent kind. Which has been a bother because who wants to wash dishes by hand right? So Ammon tells me that if you use a quarter as much soap, you can actually use the other kind of dish soap in the dishwasher and it will be just fine. He was wrong.  There was this book from my childhood that I love called That's Good, That's Bad. It was a great book, and I'm reminded of it when I think about the whole experience. "I cleaned the dishes. Thats good! but the dishwasher exploded. Thats bad! But now the floor is clean too. Thats good! but it was a pain to clean up the suds. Thats bad! but it was pretty flippin hilarious. Thats good!" In the end, it was a funny, but I dont think I will be doing it again any time soon.

Despite Provo being an exciting place and all, it is a little more dead than I'm used to right now, so there are moments that arent as exciting as they could be. Google+ has angry birds on it and you can compete against your friends. Now, angry birds is addicting enough, but throw in the competitive bit, and well, Ammon and I have been playing a little more than is probably considered healthy. On a side note, i still prefer Facebook to Google+, just throwing that out there so you know where my loyalties lie. I just realized that most of the things I want to write about happened around the apartment. Thats weird, but thats where all the funniest stuff has gone down. I have left at least a few times in the last few weeks though. Just last night I went out with friends to see some awesome music at some little restaurant place I've never heard of before. The great thing about Provo is its very musically inclined so its easy to see some pretty great local stuff, usually for free, if you know where to look.

Ok now that I've proved that I left the apartment at least once in the last couple weeks, back to tales from the apartment. I was sitting on the couch eating pie straight from the tin (it was on sale at Smiths because it was old, gotta love the managers special!) and drinking milk from the jug, both of which I do because of a desire to not wash dishes, when Ammon just started laughing at me. I was a little taken aback by this outburst and so I inquired as to what the heck he found so dang entertaining about the way I eat. As it turns out, it was a rather insightful observation. He said that some foods are depressing foods, and a person cant help but look depressed eating large amounts of pie and milk unless its at some sort of holiday thing like Christmas or Thanksgiving.  Other foods such as yogurt, are happy foods because its hard to look unhappy while eating it. It as a pretty funny thing to say and I'm not sure that I agree with it 100% but it made me think, thats for sure. Consequently  the next day I got sick and threw up for the first time in 4 years, I was suspicious that the pie was the culprit. However, I disproved that theory the day after I got better by eating about a quarter of the pie for lunch and not throwing it up. Sure, I could have tried a small bite to see if it made me queasy but go big or go home right? Alright, thats it for now, more to come as I feel so inclined to report.

Whats left of the pie (the box says its peach but its clearly apple)

The Psychology of Weirdies and Other Thoughts

Hello, my name is Tyler. This is my blog. It's actually existed for a while but I never got around to actually writing anything. The only reason I'm really even doing this now is because I'm currently unemployed and have nothing better to do (more on my employment status later) so i figured I would start writing blog posts and pretend people would want to read them. The title of my blog "some humor and some bewilderment" is ripped from a quote I like by some physicist named Freeman Dyson and the full quote is this, "It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment." I honestly have no idea who the guy is but when I found this quote it struck a chord with me, I think its a pretty accurate statement, its how I feel about life anyway. I'm not really sure how the rest of the world goes about writing blogs but I intend to just write whatever thoughts are rattling around in my head at the time, if it ends up just looking like a bunch of incoherent word vomit then, oh well, I'm really only writing this for me anyway.

Right now the topic I've been pondering is relationships. It's no surprise really, I'm 22, male, a BYU student, and single. I know that I'm not the only one either, my sister pointed out something interesting the other day. She said that every movie ever made has some love related element included. Even if its not the main story line, even the most gritty action movie has its moments, even if that moment is just a random NCMO scene with a wildly attractive girl. I tried for the longest time to think of a single movie where that wasn't true because i love proving my sister wrong but, I just couldn't think of one. I'm sure there must be one out there but I don't know what it is. The fact is, we love love. And arguably no college loves it more than BYU, we have the highest marriage rate out of all the universities in the United States. I was over at a friends house and we were discussing the travails of BYU dating. My friend said that it was funny how weird people seemed to get married quickly, not that normal people didn't get married fast as well but that weird people get married quickly in greater percentages. One of her roommates made the comment that she seemed to attract "the weirdies" and how she hoped that didn't make her a weirdie too. We came to the conclusion that weird people get married faster because they have had fewer relationships in life so when they find someone who is willing to put up with their quirks they are much more dedicated to making the relationship work and are more willing to forgive the quirks of the other person as well. Also, some weird people seem to make a move on everyone, so if we have a population of say, 100 and only 5 of them are "weirdies" those few may pursue a large portion of the others in a relatively short amount of time and thus lead everyone to believe that he or she attracts weird people. So its not the attracting weird people, its being attracted to those weird people, that is the better litmus test for your relative weirdness.

Well, thats pretty much it for now. I've got the second round of interviews for this job I applied for coming up on thursday. It's a job with the IT department on campus teaching students and faculty how to use microsoft office and adobe programs. I made it past the first round so thats a good sign I guess. I'm not sure about my chances but I want this job, and not just because I'm currently unemployed and going stir crazy either. Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with some of the adobe programs. It seems like that would be a problem seeing as how I'm trying to get a job teaching how to use them and all, but they say its not that important, I can just learn them and certify in them once I have the job. I'm not worried, I'm pretty good at learning new programs. Its getting the job thats going to be the hard part. I enjoy teaching and this seems like a good one so, fingers crossed.