Apartment Search

Seriously, BYU should have something similar to the reality TV show Survivor when it comes to finding an apartment. For those of you outside of the realm that is zoobieville, aka Brigham Young University, BYU has a policy that all apartments rented by students must be approved apartments by the school that promise they will obey certain guidelines and rules such as provide an environment where the honor code will be enforced, certain amenities in the apartments, etc. It is a great idea and I think it has its place, but in all reality, the desired outcome for BYU approved housing is not what a student truly gets. BYU has set up a two-mile radius around campus and has said only housing in that region would be approved, which actually sort of limits the number of apartments a student can rent and I have seen several great apartments outside of the region which are really good. Well, by the laws of supply and demand, limited housing means less supply, so rent goes up, and since students have less options to choose from, the quality in the apartments tend to be, well, really bad! This is what the typical BYU student is dealing with and it truly is a journey of survival to find a good apartment that is at a good price is not falling apart. Hence my journey on looking for an apartment! Oh the joy.

I am in a unique situation. I live in Provo, I have grown up here, I went to Provo High School (it is right across the street from BYU), and I still live at my parent’s house. I have some sweet digs, my own private room which is bigger than any of the rental rooms I have seen (that includes the Avenue private apartments), my food is made by good ol’ mom and dad, and I have a lot of space and privacy. Oh, and parking is never an issue. With that said, some would say I am crazy for wanting to move out, I mean come on, moving in to an apartment would really lower my quality of living and I would be paying for the decrease rather than live for free in a house!

But for some reason I have really been interested in just getting out and experiencing life a little bit more. While I was in Brazil, I lived in apartments, I cooked my own food (alright, we actually ate a lot of prepared meals by the church members there almost every day, I love Brazilian hospitality!), and I felt more free to make my own decisions. I was independent and I want to feel that again for at least a little while. And although I am quite the specimen and I am totally awesome, my social life tends to be non-existent since I live so far away from everybody and it is really convenient to stay at home. Getting out of the house for a little while and finding a rented apartment will let me feel more independent and just increase my social life. Plus let’s be honest, I will probably end up moving back in to my parent’s home when I kill these “needs”. I will finally realize why it is so good to live at home!

The search has been interesting. I went to Liberty Square and King Henry Apartments, hearing they have an amazing social life. I can see why with their large complexes and their hordes of immature girls which lead to the coveted sophomore fling by the crazy guys, but really the cost kind of scared me with the quality of living you get out of the apartment. I checked out the apartments around the South Side of campus and realized, I would have to park at the Provo Tabernacle just to have my car close by. Parking in that area is horrible, not to mention all the apartments I looked at were . . . run down to put it nicely. Why is that area so desired to rent from; besides the fact it is as close to campus as you can get and you get to chase awesome ducks every morning by the pond on your way up the stairs of death to campus?

My price range makes me a cheapskate at the range of $250 - $300, so most of the apartments I would find were tiny apartments with a really tiny kitchen and shared rooms with a tall bunk bed in an area with five other men and one bathroom . . . oh the insanity. Oh they all seemed to have a weird smell to them.

But hey, the apartment search is fun! It is great to get to the office and find a married lady who always seems to be pregnant who runs the place. These ladies always have the funniest stories about how the tenants are insane and all the messed up things they do. I think I’ll just go apartment searching just to hear their crazy stories so I might stay entertained. But the search continues for an adequate apartment to my liking which won’t kill my budget. Maybe I am downgrading from luxury to a small damp room called an apartment, but it will be a fun experience as I go along with it.

Dance Parties!

Dance parties are something strange. There is a primal instinct in all of us to move our bodies to obnoxious rhythms. It helps us relieve stress, have fun, and show off to the opposite sex. Well at this time of the year being Valentine’s Day, there seems to be a lot of those, especially for the singles out there in the United States. I figure dances always occur during this time to help singles out there find their valentine so we do not feel so lonely on this day of days.


This Valentine’s Day weekend I attended two of them myself, either because I just like to dance, socialize and glamorize in all of the attention I can get at them or because I was really bored and wanted something to do. Either way, I had fun!

The first dance I went two actually was at my youngest brother’s school, it happens to be a chartered school and the group who organized it rented it out, one big coincidence. Well thanks to the impersonal event system on Facebook I was invited to the party where my friend was DJing. I arrived there thinking I would run in to at least a few friends since they tend to know the same DJ and are invited to all the same events. Wouldn’t you know it, I did not know anyone there except the DJ. Well, rather than scouring away like a normal person I decided to take this opportunity to meet a lot of new people that I probably would never see again. I had a good time dancing the “All the Single Ladies”, Lady Gaga, the Top 40, and all the other dances. This dance had a lot of people from the same ward there although about 500 people were invited on Facebook, all of them clicking “Maybe” as their status for maybe being at the dance so not to hurt their inviters feelings although I pretty sure the inviters weren’t there either. This ward was about the only group there and so everyone asked me, “Who are you here with?” “Why, I am here just too party friend!” I would respond “I hear that!” They would say back, then I would talk to them for maybe two minutes and then move on to the next person where the same situation would go down. Good times, guaranteed that is the last time I show up at a random dance party without some other friend there I can sucker in going with me.

The next dance party I went to was a lot less awkward, it was put on by my local church congregation and we invited about nine other ward (congregations) over as well. To be honest, Utah Mormon dance parties are lame when it comes to turnout. There was maybe over 900 people invited to this dance and maybe 100 showed up, but that did not stop the people there to have fun! This was a Valentine’s Day dance and there was a lot of great food provided by the Marvellous Catering Company (I recommend them for any wedding, party, corporate event, spoiled sweet-16 party, etc). Several people just busted out the moves, it was a blast. Really, these kind of dance parties are fun. People just go out there and have fun and they do not care if they dance or not. A lot of people need to have that kind of attitude, maybe they cannot dance, but really, what white person can? (the king of pop technically does not count!) and they need to go out there and just have fun! That is how this dance party was and it was great. In the end I got to dance with a few cute girls and realize that the conversation was boring during the dance, so they therefore lost my interest. Seriously, these dance parties between singles ward are made just to find people to date, and I found a cool girl who caught my interest and I got her number. Thinking I was all cool about it, I decided to advertise this to a friend, only to discover he had four numbers from the dance. . . someone is a number hog.

Basically dance parties are fun, when you are not by yourself at a party where you are expecting someone to be there that you know. So just go out there and dance, meet new people, party on, and go crazy. It makes life fun! We all every once in a while need to just flow with the groove and have some fun, dancing will let you do that.

Wedding Receptions

Just as a reference, there are big differences between what I call a Utah wedding reception and a regular American wedding reception. The regular American wedding consists of a large room, such as a chapel with a lot of pews, a long procession of people, and the song “Here Comes the Bride”, well, that is what we called it when I was a kid. After that there is a large dinner where the bride and groom along with their families sit at a large table in front of the room and people toast one another for hopes of a great marriage. Then after that there is usually a wickedly awesome dance party.

The Utah wedding reception is nothing like this. A good number of people in Utah are members of the LDS church and many of them get married in an LDS temple where it is a very solemn ceremony with few people in attendance. After that everyone goes over to a large building or outdoors, the bride and groom stand in a long line while everyone they know and do not know come over and shake your hand and tell you how great you look. The people in line basically sit there for eight minutes to wait for this five second opportunity, they then go over and grab some cake, talk with their friends for five minutes about maybe asking the bride’s maid or the best man out, and then leave. Let’s just say I find Utah receptions lame.

Why do we put ourselves through this torture? I can only talk on the side as a guest, but seriously. I am now at that age where many of my friends are getting married, so I am going to a lot of wedding receptions, especially Utah ones. I get boarder every time. I go sand stand in a line, give the bride and groom my corny congratulations with my strange humor, I go get some food, and then have an awkward ten minute conversation with the bride’s uncle who I have never met in my entire life, and then leave. I go to these receptions to show support for my friends and their new spouses but is that my only logical reason to put myself through so much?

On the bright side, wedding receptions are always happy, everyone is nice, and there is always some crazy funny guy doing something insanely humorous. But hey, in the end the receptions exists just to let all the old people you have known since you were a kid come over to say “my, look how much you’ve grown, I remember when you were this tall and you set fire to my lawn.” So let’s continue this tradition for the old people!

Holiday Movies

The end of the year is enjoyable not just because of all the fun holidays, but also because of all the movies that we get to see. They are not those lame movies either that usually come out in the middle of March or August or one of the other lame movie months, they are great movies that one can actually enjoy. Recently I saw two of these movies and they were great! I am not usually a person who goes out and sees a movie the first weekend it comes I also usually wait until it hits a dollar theater, and then on Tuesday nights I go to the 50 cent showing of those movies at the dollar theater, (yes I am a cheapskate) but a good movie, I am willing to go to the $5.50 matinee.

The first film I saw was Avatar. This movie is getting great reviews from all sorts of people, I have to fully agree with those reviews. If you are living under a rock and for some reason this is your only form a communication which means you have not heard from anyone about this great film, I will give a short background on the story. It is your typical bad guy turns good guy film, much like Dances for Wolves or the Last Samurai, only it takes place on a world call Pandora between humans and the natives of this world called the Na'vi. The film is called Avatar because the humans have the ability to create genetically altered bodies of these Na'vi and the humans control these bodies as if they were actually that being. The idea of an avatar is a being with the consciousness of another being, like ancient religious ideas of a god taking the form of a mortal, that is why the movie is called Avatar. Well the main character ends up getting in to a tribe of these Na'vi, falls in love with a girl, and then fights with them to save this world from the evil humans.

The movie has incredible action scenes, stunning camera shots with special effects, and a nice flow to the story. The story was fairly predictable and there was no actor that stood out as an Oscar potential and the dialog was actually quite bland, but it was a good movie and I recommend anyone to go see it. I would give this movie 4/5. They actually had to invent new movie making techniques and technologies to make this movie which are expected to revolutionize the movie industry.

The next film I saw this holiday break was The Blind Side. This was by far my favorite movie of 2009. The movie is actually based on a true story of NFL player Michael Oher and his struggles growing up before he entered the NFL. I really have no complaints about this movie. The actors were perfect for their parts, the story kept you in your seat, and the dramatic timing was perfect. This is saying a lot, considering I got to the theater exactly when the previews started, all of the good seats were taken, so my friend and I sat on the second row on the far left side. I had to crook my neck to watch the entire film, after about ten minutes in to the film I was so glued to the sliver screen that I forgot about my neck position. Sandra Bullock plays the female lead and I definitely think she will be getting an Oscar nomination for her role. This film gets 5/5.

The film deals a lot with good values to help others since the main family in the movie takes in Michael Oher who literally has nothing. The film deals a lot with racial issues and shows how those can be greatly overcome. It also gives hope to anyone in a hard situation.

I am trying to figure out what it is about real stories in movies that make these kind of movies so good. It could be the drama or anything like that, but I also think that we can actually connect with these films, because it is real life, the stories have actually happened and they inspire us in so many ways. I hope more movies like The Blind Side are created, I just love these kind of movies so much.

Get out there and go see some good movies, there are a lot of good ones out there for crazy college students to full blown families. You will love the time to just get away from life for a while.

Merry Christmas, and Santa Clause is Real!

Christmas is such a great holiday! For many, it is a time to come together with their family and to enjoy some quality time with them. For a lot, that also means a lot of fights over the leftovers in the fridge and what to watch on TV, but that comes in line with having a great family. Would we really want to spend our time with boring people who are perfect all the time? No sir, I love spending time with my siblings and getting in fights with them over which Nintendo game is the greatest of all time. But in all seriousness, I can attest to how great it is to be with our families during this great holiday season. I was in Brazil for two Christmases and I was not able to be with my family for that time and it changes the feeling of the season, I was not depressed by any means, but it certainly was different, I can better understand how some people feel when they just do not have the means to be with their families during this special time.

Christmas is interesting with its vast commercialism and ability to drive people crazy to get to the next big sale (aka Black Friday), but for me, Christmas has another special meaning as well. I have strong faith in my religion and in Jesus Christ, I believe that he is the savior of all mankind and I testify of that. So this holiday is special for me not only for the reason that I can spend time with my family, give gifts, and also get a lot of cool stuff, but also because of what it represents about Christ. It is a special time for me to remember the miracles of his birth and the great teachings he has left us.

The traditional idea of Christmas is very much tied up in Christ’s doctrines. During Christmas there is a stronger emphasis on charity and showing love for others. We always hear the phrase, "it is better to give than to receive." People in general are just happier and they are more prone to forgive. Many of these desires to love others were taught by Christ and are greatly emphasized in his teachings. I see Christmas as a seasonal time that the teachings of Christ are actually fulfilled more often than any other time of the year, and what is great about it is that these expressions of love occur not only amongst Christians, but people of other faiths or lack thereof as well and we can see many great redeeming qualities of mankind. Now if only we could only have the spirit of Christmas all year long?

By the way, Santa Clause is real! I do not care what anybody thinks. Everyone who tells me he does not exist has lied to me in the past about other topics, so why would they tell me the truth now? They are just jealous that I am always on Santa’s nice list. Plus when I was like five, Santa told me at the mall where I went to see him that he was real! Santa has never lied to me and I love him. Just to prove that he is real, I will have an expedition to the north pool to see his elf-sweat-shop factory. I will bring back large candy canes as proof that I visited good ol’ Saint Nick. I will need volunteers to aid me on my journey; people may send me their applications to go on a journey of a lifetime!

Merry Christmas everybody, I hope it was enjoyable for everyone.

Dating is . . . interesting

Oh dating, what an interesting concept established since the beginning of time, although I’m pretty sure concep

tually it has changed over time. Actually I think it was a lot easier back in the day of the cavemen. When you wanted a women, all you had to do was take a club to her head and drag her all across town by the hair to show you both were now a couple. Anyways, dating is a completely strange yet exciting experience that we all love to hate, and yet we still put ourselves through it.

To me, dating seems like it should be so easy, the process is so simple, sure I am talking from a guy’s perspective but it will have to do. You meet a cute girl, you talk to her for a little bit, you are suddenly interested in her. In the moment you get her number and ask her out. After several dates and you finally get to know the girl, you fall in love, date even more, eventually get engaged and get married. There is a lot to the process, but simple enough nonetheless. Sure it looks simple on paper, but it sure is a lot more complicated than that. You have to ask yourself “does she like me?”, “why does she not answer her phone when I call?”, “is she actually interested in me or just doesn’t know how to say no?”, “what am I doing wrong?”, “when should I take it to the next level?”, etc. Dating is some tricky stuff.

I’ll be honest, before my two-year mission to Brazil, I basically went on three dates and all of them were to high school dances. I wasn’t really interested in dating at all and to tell you the truth, girls had cuties back then! When I got home when I was 21 and my mission president pumped in to my head all sorts of concepts of marriage and my sacred duty to get married, I all of the sudden was interested in dating. Yeah, that was interesting asking a girl out for my first date home. I think I made every mistake in the book, I have progressed a lot since then. My point, dating is a game of practice. When I first got home I had no idea how to ask a girl out, what to do for a date, how a double date worked, etc. Now I feel like I somewhat get it, but that took a lot of dates between getting home and now to actually figure it out. I still don’t feel like I know a lot about dating, but I certainly know a lot more.

Man, I have some weird stories. I once randomly asked out my bank teller out because of the mere thought that she was cute and we flirted a little bit. That date was fun and she was a cool person. She was the first person I asked out on a second date, and turned out to be my first rejection for a second date as well. I learned how to take rejection and actually realize that she wasn’t denying me because something was wrong with me, rather she wasn’t interested. I think I’ve learned a lot since then that you are going to have a lot of first dates and a lot of those dates are not going to become second dates just because you or the other just aren’t interested and it is as simple as that.

Can I say something, don’t ask people out via text (unless it is something quick like ice cream I guess). Funny story, so there is this cute girl I met after I got home, I talked to her and few times and decided she was cool. We are in the same ward (for those of you who don’t know, that would be my church congregation). On a beautiful sunny day, I was outside studying and out of the blue I received a text message, it was from I number I didn’t recognized but the person stated her name in the text. So after a few quick messages I put the number in my phone with her name and left it at that. Several weeks later I decided “hey, it would be cool to go on a date with her.”, so I texted her asking her to go out with me that weekend with a large group of people in our ward, it was late at night and I imagine she was tired, but she responded yes. The day of the date I called to confirm to see if it would still work out. “Hello?” says a deep man’s voice “uh, hi, is *blank* there.” I said.

“Yes, this is him.”

“Oh, I must have the wrong number.”

After a quick search of the ward directory of phone numbers, I discovered the number I had was not from the girl I thought I had asked out, in reality it was from a guy who has the exact same name she had. Hilarious! After the shock and embarrassment I found out this guy thought I was inviting him to join the group date with his own date. Lesson learned: don’t text people to ask out on dates, you might be texting a man!

In the end I am still trying to figure out how the whole dating thing works and I am learning my lessons through messed up experiences. Dating is fun yet horrible at the same time. As I have heard from several married people “I am so glad I don’t have to date anymore.” As they should be, they already did their time going through all the drama to find their spouse. Another thing I heard from a friend “If my wife died today, I would stay single just so I could escape the horrible mess that is dating.” That’s encouraging! Oh well, right now I am enjoying dating and I am going to keep doing just for the sake of going on dates. Who knows, maybe my time will come that I can say with my beautiful wife in my arms “dating, thank goodness that’s over!”

Choices, choices

Life comes at you fast! Recently I have been thinking a lot about my life. What classes should I take next semester? Should I do an internship in Brazil or stick to the United States? Do I really want to spend $1,000 just for an LDS singles cruise? Out of all the girls I am crushing on, who should I get to know at this time, who should I hang out with, who should I ask out on my next date? (Dating consumes about 90% of my thought time). What should I do for homework at this very instant? Should I move out and have a social life, or should I stick it out at home and save thousands of dollars in a year? Why does life have so many questions!?

It is incredible to me how much life has to offer and how many options we can choose from. There are a lot of great and horrible choices, as well as good options and bad options. It seems we are always being put in to positions to make choices rather than being able to do every single thing we want. Life is so cruel making us make sacrifices in order to live it. I am not in any extreme life or death situation, but I sure feel like there are a lot of huge decisions on my plate at the moment, and all of them have immense benefits.

With regard to school I can take the business core right now and graduate in 2011, but if I do that I wouldn’t be able to do a joint Bachelor/Master program. Decision, graduate that much sooner and be rid of the curse of homework or add on a whole new degree of homework and graduate with a Master’s.

I have a few offers to take internships in Brazil, of I take them, I could progress in my desire to do international business, but then I run the risk of jeopardizing a promising future at my current job.

Dating, well, that is just a completely different animal (plans to write a future article on that). Let us just say, I do not know the first thing about women, so therefore I am having an interesting time learning the old-fashioned way, ie, going on dates and messing up a ton.

Moving out of my home in to a student apartment would increase my non-existent social life by a ton. But then I would have to spend a lot more money, sleep in a room with an entire other person, be away from my mom’s home cooked meals, and a nice quiet place to study.

Choices, decisions, options, what is up with that? Maybe if I restore Soviet Russia they can choose my life pursuits for me.

Well everyone, choose your options well, because there are a lot of them!