Well, its been about a month since my last post. That's mostly because school started and I've suddenly become super busy. It always amazes me how I can do homework all day and still never be quite where I feel I need to be. Its something like surfing, I feel like I'm riding a wave of due dates, always on the brink of disaster and being buried alive by the unforgiving ocean of what I'm expected to accomplish. Ok, to be honest, I was going for a poetic/emo sound in that last line. How did I do? It's a little goofy but I think the imagery is nice, don't you? Actually, I'm doing pretty good in school so far, despite having lots of homework things are great, I even enjoy that homework sometimes. Except for accounting, that class sucks, mostly because its fairly monotonous so far. But luckily its just one class, most of my course load this semester is poli sci stuff. I'm majoring in international relations and in half my classes basically I get to sit around and argue about world politics with people. Its great!
My new ward is pretty awesome too, its full of cool people (and quite a few very attractive girls). I have a calling on the Publicity committee which basically means that I have no calling, so that's nice, I have enough going on right now. I have 3 sets of people to home teach, and that is one set more than my last ward. It's more work but I don't mind, I really like home teaching because its basically just an excuse to hang out with people that I would hang out with anyway.
Returning back to school topics, I stumbled upon an interesting discovery the other day. I was reading an article about nationalism for pl sc 150 and it was talking about how much we characterize someone based on their nationality. It talked about how, when living abroad, people are more likely to be identified by their country of origin than anything else. For example, we would identify someone as "the German guy" when that is really the least descriptive thing we could say. Consequently, people living abroad are more likely to identify themselves by their nationality and have a stronger sense of patriotism because of it. Now, you may not care about any of that but I was thinking about how much this idea applies to Texans. The media has done a great job over the last several decades of building up the image of Texas through western movies and the like so that now when I talk to people at BYU a lot of times they say things like, "oh, you're from Texas huh? I bet you think your state is pretty great don't you?" Now, I'm not a big "Texas pride" kind of guy, but when people start talking about your home like that, no matter where you're from, you feel the need to defend it. This and other types of comments creates a cycle that feeds on itself and leads to things like putting Texas flags everywhere and such. That's my opinion anyway, I could be wrong. It wouldn't be the first time.
Ok that's all I have time for right now. I have to go do more homework type stuff, I have 4 tests and 2 papers all due in the next week. Yeah, I'm not too happy about that. You might be wondering how I even have time to write a blog post right now and its simple really, I'm procrastinating. And now I'm going to stop procrastinating and do my homework. Well... I'm going to stop writing this post anyway.
