What do I want for Christmas?

World Peace, of course. What kind of material thing do you want? :P

Thanksgiving and candy bars.

How was your Thanksgiving break?

Thanksgiving was alright. coming back to school was difficult for me emotionally.

What is your favorite candy bar?

I have to be in the modo for candy bars. Right now, when its cold and I am not hungry, just the thought of candy is completely unappealing. When I am in the mood for a candy bar, which one i want generally is determined by whimsy.

The Fake Snow Controversy

This was in response to a question about whether or not ski resorts should use machine-made snow to extend the ski season. There are economic pros and cons, but I'm not an economist.

The fake snow controversy really doesn't affect me much because I don't really ski or snowboard. Not that I have a no skiing policy or anything, It's just a lot of effort and requires quite a bit of time. You can't just go skiing for an hour or two when you have an hour or two because you have to drive up to the mountains and rent skis and buy lift tickets and put on those bulky boots and etc, so it pretty much has to be an all day thing. The last time I had an entire day to devote to any kind of entertainment was in 2002 and I was just out of high school.

Other Blogs and Dream Cars

If money were no object, what car would you want?

I would want an old-style fire engine, one with the mounted squirt gun on the top. I would have a chauffer drive it, and if someone tailgated me or cut me off, I'd drench em!



Comment on a classmate's blog.

Bryan's blog used to be very pink and full of teenage-girl OMG-speak and writing about how gorgeous Orlando Bloom is. He seems to have changed it recently.

Celebrity Crush?

Who is your celebrity crush and why?

I don't have one. Sorry.

Christmas Music

When do I start listening to christmas music? well, any time of year is a good time to rock out to Manheim Steamroller's rendition of "Hark The Herald Angels Sing." when i was like 8, my brother and I used to dance in front of the CD player and play air guitar to that song. I did in fact listen once to it sometime in october. But I won't listen to a lot of christmas music until december. And when i do, it will nearly all be classical, instrumental or choral. The chrismas songs that are played on the radio are generally annoying to me.

Haloween

What did you do for halloween?


Well, Its November 2nd, and I've already forgotten. So either it was a really really good party, or I didn't do anything too memorable.

Not Doing Homework

Not only will i be blowing off all my assignments over the weekend, as is almost always the case. But even this early friday morning i am already making cool abstract art with illustrator instead of working on projects.

Angry Moms and Questions I'd like to ask

Tell the story of the time your mom got really angry at you.

I don't know. I got in my fair share of trouble, and my mom was often exasperated with me, and I got pretty angry with my mom a few times during my adolescent-question-everything phase. I never did anything that made her really angry though, except argue with her, and that doesn't make a story.

What questions would you like to have asked of your classmates?
I love truth or dare!
What was your worst dating experience? (by this I mean an awkward date, not a dramatic breakup story that portrays yourself as a victim. yawn.)
What is the craziest thing you have done during your college experience?
How/when/where/who was your first kiss?
If you were to get a tattoo, what would it be and where?

How embarassing.

What is your most embarrassing moment?


There was a time when I falsely accused a bus driver of giving me incorrect change, as if he was trying to rip me off for 50 cents or something. I'm not really ashamed of being wrong, as everybody is wrong every now and then. I am a little ashamed about being petty enough to care about the small amount of change that I thought he had stolen from me, since even if he had, he probably needed it more than me, but what is most embarrassing is how angry and rude I was and the tantrum I threw during the few minutes that I thought I was right. This experience, I think, is a pretty good example of how "righteous indignation" often leads us to do things that are a: fundamentally unrighteous, and b: stupid. So, that's pretty much the most embarrassing thing I can think of.

Haloween Costume.

One year I wore my dad's old mission suit, carried a breifcase and told people I was an IRS agent and that their Candy Tax was due.

Another year I cut a head-hole in a cardboard box and made a Tank costume with a gun made out of cardboard tubes. I had a little window cut in the front of the tank for people to insert candy into, with a bag there that would catch it, but people kept putting the candy down the gun tube instead which was frustrating.

Illustrating.

Adobe Illustrator is still pretty hard to use for me. Today, I made this cool Brazilian Flag.

Bad Hair

What is the worst haircut you've ever had?


I've always been pretty conservative with my haircuts. Sometimes they're a little too short, and sometimes I go for a while without getting one and then it's a little too long, and it then gets curly and can be disorderly. But I've never had a BAD haircut in the sense of something intentionally tasteless. My hair naturally is kind of thin and wavy so it's hard to do anything with it.

Reading for fun.

What are you reading right now for fun?


Right now? nothing.
What have I read for fun? Just about everything. Isaac Asimov, Lloyd Alexander, Avi --- those are just the "A" names that come to thee top of my head.

What I don't read for fun: Dr. Seuss & Robert Ludlum. I think these are two of the most overrated authors of the 20th century. I may think of more and add them later.

Although, as far as overrated authors of the 20th century go, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Joyce are even more so. Why people read this drivel I don't know. Oh yeah, its because their professors make them.

And mentioning them makes me think of Tom Clancy. There's an interesting literary phenomenon. Most of his writing is mediocre at best but because his characters are patriotic and believe in something and he treats that with respect, lots of people who are tired of reading existential snivellings of the James Joyce wannabes that dominate 20th century fiction embrace it.

I could go on and on about any number of authors and books, but it's not the best use of our time.

Love, True Love

Tell me about your first love.


I don't know if I've ever been in love. I don't get distraught over brakeups. My attitude is that romance is to make people happy and if one or both people are unhappy with the relationship it's time to end it. Once I was talking to one of my freinds who was all morose and melancholy over some girl and I said essentially "You didn't see me get all mopey when so-and-so dumped me last month, why can't you just be more like me and take these things better?" and he said "it's obvious that you've never been in love." Maybe he was right. Then again, maybe I just have better control of my emotions than he does. Or maybe both. One things for sure, though. You'll never see me engaging in self-destructive behaviors because I think I'm in love with someone who makes me unhappy.

Tradition!

What are your traditions for general conference weekend?

Well, I'm pretty far from my California roots, and so I don't really have any conference traditions. When i was little my family would go to the stake center to watch conference and we would bring a picnic basket and in between sessions eat a picnic lunch on the lawn. Now, I'll wake up, turn the radio on, and doze through the first session, sort of listening without getting out of bed. Then I'll get up, make myself a large brunch, and watch the second session on TV.

Saturday sessions I usually miss because I work Saturdays. I catch priesthood on Saturday night with a few of my boys, usually in the Mariott center although once or twice we tried to find a place to watch it with comfortable seats, which meant driving around Mapleton from chapel to chapel with my cousin and his friends. We were about 45 minutes late because we had a hard time finding seats in any of the chapels, and we ended up not in comfortable ones. fortunately Mapleton is small and there are a lot of chapels otherwise we would have been later.

Forever Scarred

What is your best scar story?

My scars are mostly of the emotional kind. Like when my pet rabbit died, and so we tried to bury it in a cardboard box in the feild behind our house, and then some neighbor kids dug it up and put firecrackers inside its head and blew open its skull and bragged to me about it, and then I went and saw it and it was pretty gross. That day I learned that we live in a cruel, cruel world, and have been scarred by that knowledge ever since.

Another experience that scarred me, and that coincidentally, also involves scars, happened on my mission. Me and my companion started talking to a drunken ex-policeman. He wasn't wearing a shirt and he started pointing to several bullet scars in his lower abdomen, saying "I took a bullet here, took another one here--God have mercy on me" and with this last invocation, suddenly pulled down his jeans to show that he had lost a testicle to a gunshot.

I may never recover from the trauma of seeing that particular scar.

What's in your bowl?

What is your favortie breakfast cereal?

Frosted mini spooners! They are malt-o-meal's knockoff of frosted mini-wheats but their name is at least three times as cool.

Kashi has a low-sugar-non-frosted-cinammon-flavored organic whole wheat mini-wheat type cereal that is unbeleivably delicious but expensive so I rarely buy it. But if I had more money I would eat it all the time. What can I say? I'm a Californian.

I won't eat any cereal that lists sugar or corn syrup as ingredient number one. If there is more sugar than grain, I won't buy it. I used to like golden wheat puffs until I found out that they had mroe sugar than wheat and then i stopped buying them. Golden wheat puffs indeed, more like golden high-fructose corn syrup puffs!

I also love wheaties and cheerios.

Another huge turn-off is if there are a lot of artificial flavors or colors. Especially if the additives form a greasy film on top of the milk or turn the milk all thick and slimy.

I loathe those hard little fake marshmallows in Lucky Charms, so Lucky charms has my vote for grossest cereal ever. My old roomate's dad was a vice president of General Mills and sent him boxes of the stuff and he gave some to me, and i tried to pick all the "marshmallows out and eat the actual cereal but it was like the things were multiplying in there. I just kept finding more and more of them. I had to pour the whole bowl down the sink. Waste of good milk. Even without most of the marhmallows, the cereal itself was almost too sweet to swallow and my throat was rebelling.

The "berries" in Captain CrunchBerries gross me out too. I don't know what they are, but berries they ain't.

Ready for the apocalypse?

What is the one food you must have in your food storage, that you can't live without?

Dried apricots. Armageddon can come as long as I got 'em. Oh yeah.

Skills

What is your best trait?

I like my zany sense of humor. but some people don't.

Frailty

What is your worst trait?

I think this says it all.

David: What do you think are your greatest strengths as a manager?
Michael: Why don't I tell you what my greatest weaknesses are? I work too hard. I care too much. And sometimes I can be too invested in my job.
David: Okay. And your strengths?
Michael: Well, my weaknesses are actually... strengths.
-the office.

Specimen.

What is your favorite specimen?


Myself, of course: the perfect specimen of masculinity.

Oh, in my rock collection...

Actually, I have a nice piece of schist that I got from the santequin creek wash. It is shiny and gold-colored. very pretty. It's fun to make schist jokes with geology-illiterate freinds.

Me: "Hey catch this! -- how does it feel to be touching a piece of schist?"
Freind: "No way man, is it really?"
Me: What?

I also have a couple chunks of malachite that is a pretty green color. And some obsidian that is pretty cool-looking. And I have a bunch of trilobites somewhere, packed among my stuff. All very cool.

A Sour Note

What musical instruments do you play, or if you don't play any, why don't you?


I am not musically talented. No one in my family is. Well, my dad played trombone in high school band, for whatever that is worth, and he was known to occasionally break out a recorder and play the melodies to hymns. But none of us sing well. Music Lessons were something that was not so much as considered in my childhood by anyone in the household. Most of my friends are musically talented, though. It seems like everyone I know except me can sing a part. I can only sing melody, and if the range is very big, I may have to change back and forth between a couple of keys (in mid song) to be able to sing it.

However, when i was about 15 I decided I wanted to learn to play the guitar for the same reason that every 15 year old boy wants to play the guitar: to impress girls. Of course, I didn't know then that girls are only impressed by guitar-playing guys if the guy is also A.) good-looking, and B.) a talented singer. I was neither of the two, so I quickly found out.

So, I took a couple years of guitar lessons and learned to read music. I really enjoyed making music, although as I previously made clear, I was not very talented. I also taught myself how to play the right-hand part of a piano, and to play the recorder (provided that it is a melody which can be played in the key of c or g and all notes are between middle c and a high e) . Last year, I had a roommate who taught me how to play a few chords on a ukulele and so I have a small repertoire of three and four chord pop songs that I can play on the ukulele as well as a somewhat larger repertoire for guitar. Since I am insecure about my voice, I don't try to be beautiful, I usually try to be funny, making up parody lyrics or occasionally leaping into falsetto. I have preformed at several "talent" shows and parties, and don't do too bad for a guy with no musical background.

Food for Thought.

What is your favorite restaurant?


The restaurant I eat at most often is the Fortune Chinese Buffet on University. But That's not my favorite. I just eat there because it's cheap and close to work. If I am planning a dinner date or something like that, it would probably be Village Inn or IHOP if it's late at night: In the unlikely even that i am done with school and work and ready to socialize before 9:00 PM, I'll go to Goodwood Barbecue Co. by University mall.

However, I've never eaten better restauraunt food in the U.S. than I had during my LDS Mission in Brazil (2002-2004). I ate at a lot of great places back then, ranging from currascarias with all you can eat fillet mignon and exotic meats like gamequails and javalina to roadside hot-dog stands that the municipal health department didn't even know about. But I think my favorite of all was a little hole-in-the-wall called "Panela de Ferro" (The Iron Skillet) in Anapolis, Goias, which had an all-you-can-eat buffet of homestyle brazilian cooking (no gourmet meats here) for about $2 brasilain, which is about 85 cents U.S. Their refried beans had little bits of deep-fried pork fat in them that melted in your mouth with a burst of flavor... I know that sounds gross, but don't knock it till you've tried it.

When I Grow Up, I Want To Be A...

How did you decide to become a geologist?


As a kid, I knew I wanted to be a scientist: at least part of the time i did, there were times when i wanted to be something else, of course. I think when i was 11 or 12 I wrote my own future obituary in which I was a Nobel-winning biochemist who discovered a cure for cancer (before retiring to become Cheif Justice of the Supreme Court.)

Over my High school years, I vascilated between different sciences. I am aware of phases where i wanted to be a zoologist and specialize in rainforest fauna, a molecular biologist who would create artificial life forms (which I had no intention of forming into an army and taking over the world so stop projecting your own creepy little domination fantasies onto me), and an oceanographer who would fearlessly explore the deep sea-depths. I also thought about anthropology and archaeology. I don't think I ever really thought about geology per se, since i did not know any geologists and had little exposure to it. (earth science was not required in high school so I didn't give it much thought.) I did however, think abou becoming a Vulcanologist: That looked pretty cool.
My devotion to hard science was not unwavering. I also thought about being a writer, a diplomat, or a CIA or FBI agent. Diplomacy has never been my strong suit so I don't know what I was thinking about that one. Traveling the world was always a big plus though.

When I was 17 or 18, I decided to put all life decisions on hold until after my mission. (Three years after said mission, most of those decisions are still on hold.) When the time came to make a decision, I breifly even considered turning to the dark side (i.e. buisiness or pre-law, strictly for the money.) I realized that that would never make me happy, so I thought about it for a while. My thought process was somethign like this:

There are way more people who want to become archaeologists and anthropologists than there are jobs for them.
Ditto for writers, only worse.
Physics: They seem to spend entirely too much time doing math that involves integrals and wierd greek letters that I don't even know what mean.
Chemistry: I don't want to wear a smock and make tiny measurements into test tubes.
Biology: as much as i want to engineer an artificial life form, I really don't care to much for cutting up dead things.
Hey, Volcanoes are still cool! come to think of it, so are the oceans. And i love travel and the outdoors. I'll see what earth science has to offer and if there are career opportunites in it...

So i took Dr. Morris' geology 101 class. And it rocked.

And the rest is history. Not exciting history: history that no one wants to read and I don't want to write about.

Bettsman Returns

More thoughts on what i would be like as a superhero. See previousl post.


I think my pickup line would be "Yes. I am the fastest-moving man in the world."

Power Trip

"If you could choose any superpower for yourself, what would it be and why?"


I would want the ability to slow down time relative to myself, or to move so quickly that it were as if other people's time stopped relative to me. It's all relative, of course.

This power would make it possible for me to travel almost instantaneously and eliminate time-wasting commutes, increasing my productivity. It would also make it easy to win fights with bad guys since they wouldn't be able to see me or lay a finger on me and i could dodge all their bullets or other projectiles easily.

I think I would carry a backpack with ridiculous little princess and ballerina costumes and then, when I arrived on the scene of the crime, I would disarm and rough up the bad guys a little and then dress them in princess and ballerina costumes before I tied them up and left them for the police. Maybe I would carry a marker to draw fake glasses and mustaches on them too.

All this would be done at a leisurely pace for me, but it would happen almost instantaneously so witnesses would just see the malefactors doing their evil deeds one second, and then helplessly and ridiculously arrayed in pink the next.

I would move so fast as to be invisible to the naked eye, but I would still have to have a stylish costume so that I would look good if a high-speed video camera happened to catch me. I think I would wear black pants and a black leather jacket with a white t-shirt underneath and sunglasses if it were daytime. Maybe I would stand still long enough to pose heroically for (cute) witnesses, or go back into normal time for a second to mock the now-helpless villains before speeding off.

What Color Am I?

"Which Crayola crayon color best describes you and why?"


Right now, I think I am Denim - relaxed and casual blue, it reflects my attitude pretty well most of the time. Sometimes, depending on my mood, I might have to change colors though.

To see samples of all the Crayola colors, including denim, click here:
http://www.crayola.com/colorcensus/history/current_120_colors.cfm

The Worst.

"What, in your opinion, is the worst movie ever?"


I don't know what the worst movie ever is, but the worst movie i have seen in the past couple years is probably Dark Water. Basically, it's the exact same plot as "the ring" and made by the same guys.
It has three or four fake endings where the scene fades out and you think its over but then - oh no! on comes another scene where they try to scare you again. by the second one, the entire theater was groaning... and this was on opening weekend. People actually booed the movie once the credits came on.

Possibly the worst 8 bucks I have ever spent outside of the BYU Bookstore.

Another contender is Drowning Mona, which i saw with some friends as a teenager. It tried to be a both a murder mystery and a comedy, and was both the worst mystery and worst comedy Ihave ever seen, and every single character was so repulsive I just wished they would all die.

Not to be negative or anything.

Hola

This blog is like a tiny prokaryote that will evolve to become a complex life form. It may not be much now, but in a billion years or so you might begin to see signs of intelligence.