Guess who's back in your inbox? Me, that's who.
(This one's gonna be kinda long, so I won't feel bad if you don't read it all. Just know that I warned you.)
Our research cohort trip to Arches was quite enjoyable! We went to a place called Dead Horse Point at sunset, which was one of the most spectacular views I've ever seen. It was like an island in the sky: you drive on a two lane road out to the top of a mesa, and then you're a thousand feet above the ground, all the way around. Majestical, ehh?
If I had to translate the way I've felt the last couple of weeks into a geographic formation, I'd probably choose a mesa. In honor of Father's Day, instead of telling you how I really feel and letting you know exactly what's been going on, I'll tell you about something completely different that will leave you guessing as to what I mean. Don't worry: just like emotional convos with your dad, you still might get a feel for what I'm talking about. Mine's not like that, though, so sucks to be you guys. Happy Father's Day. Love you, Dad.
Also, because I believe in sticking it to the big guys—psychologists Kahneman and Tversky, in this case of hedonic editing—I'm gonna give you the positives (after further review) first for the benefit of your entertainment.
I think there is only one place in the entire world where minding your own business means you're fair game for someone to tell you that they're praying for you. Of course, I happen to live in said location, and in any other circumstance, it would have been a sweet sentiment that would have boosted my faith in the human race. I'll let you decide how to feel.
I was sitting in a Costa Vida with one of my close friends. She and I are relaying to one another our current woes in life and talking about some really hard and emotionally vulnerable stuff. We'd probably been chatting for about 45 minutes when a man walked up to us. I guess he'd overheard some of our conversation. In his late 40s or early 50s, he seemed like the type of guy to have a very stable accounting career and several nieces and nephews whom he calls every third weekend.
We did not know what this button-down clad fellow was going to say, but we quickly found out when he opened his mouth and said, "Excuse me, sorry, but I just wanted to tell the two of you that I'm praying for you. My first thought was, "Weirdo," but then I thought, "That was harsh, that's actually kind of sweet of him." This feeling of generosity quickly ended as he said, "But I've got to tell you something else." He launched into one of the most insane monologues I've ever heard in my life. To prevent carpal tunnel syndrome, I'll write out some of his quotes in a bulleted list so that you can scan them and laugh (or gasp) if one catches your eye. Afterwards, I'll make some attempt at a holistic explanation.
- "Look this up... the percentage of people who graduate from BYU married is the same as the acceptance rate for BYU Law School."
- "Out of 16 million members, 10% of them are between the fertile ages of 18 and 30."
- "There aren't enough men like you with a temple recommend in one hand and a W-2 in the other."
- "Men have no problem getting married! At any point, they only have to preside, provide, and protect, that's all. Women have it worse. They have to make themselves desirable somehow."
- "It'll all work out in eternity. Open Isaiah 4:1. *makes us read it, aloud* See how that says the ratio will be 7:1? and they'll be strong and independent, too."
- "God has no problem seeing his children suffer... did you know that 50% of people live in abject poverty? See, I think he's alright putting one of his favorite daughters through life without marriage."
- "How many proposals have you turned down? 1? Oh, you're doing better than most! *turns to me* How many times have you popped the question? None? See, that's the problem right there! Not enough men like you marrying girls like her."
- "Tell you what, I could get you married every month for the next 10 years."
I know there were more one-liners, but I can't remember them. Honestly, I was just curious how far he was gonna go. Immediately after, he said, "see you two later," then walked directly across University Avenue, not at the crosswalk, mind you, but in the middle of the road. God only knows where he was headed.
This was a very one-sided conversation. We provided hardly any input for him to go off of, and he clearly wasn't listening very closely to our earlier conversation because his comments were only tangentially related. He must have projected a lot of ideas onto us while he walked over to our table. We are guessing that he thought we were siblings or cousins, because my friend and I look similar enough that it's a feasible assumption.
He didn't have a thesis, as far as we could tell. Our best guess is that he was attempting to explain that I should have no problem being happy and getting married (maybe to seven wives), but my female friend should be alright not getting married if it doesn't happen in the next 24 months, since God also lets people starve and die in wars and stuff. She also should understand that she might not be desirable in this life and that God would be choosing that for her, but she shouldn't be too sad because she'll eventually be paired up with someone when she dies. I should know that my job is just to go out and get married and it should be really easy since I have all of the prerequisites: a W-2, a temple recommend, and missionary service and that I should have no trouble at all since that's all every woman wants anyway and that I obviously don't need to consider anything else besides her current temple recommend status.
Have no fear. I don't believe anything this guy said, and I have survived an experience with a Provo, UT crackhead trippin' on nothing more than life itself. This dude was absolutely crazy.
If you're not LDS, none of that probably made sense to you. I don't have the volumes required to detail the cultural undertones that jumped like grasshoppers on coals, so you'll have to excuse my lack of explanation.
It was a bit ironic though, because he said everything he did with no knowledge of what's been going on in my life recently. Like I said, it was only tangentially related. His comments didn't make me feel any better about the situation he knew nothing about.
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You'll have to interpret the next part as you will. I promise I'm alright, though. Such is the fun in being the one with the pen; you don't choose what the reader hears, only what they see.
I've done it before, but I'm going to praise Mac Miller's album Circles again. I've listened to it a lot lately because I feel like it speaks to me in a way that other things don't, and recent circumstances have made it all the louder. I've mentioned single songs before, but I want to discuss the album as a whole this time.
Enter Will's explanation of his favorite album ever.
Circles is completely different from the rest of Mac Miller's music. It isn't swaggy white boy music, it isn't flex-my-money anthems, and it isn't a bunch of party songs. Circles is a conversation, with quiet, intimate vocals and smooth delivery. Mac Miller talks to himself from different parts of his life, different times, different moods, different headspaces. He writes, "You're feeling sorry, and I'm feeling fine." As the listener, you can't tell which voice is which, because spoiler alert, they're all his. His thoughts are woven together with no effects, no complicated harmonies, and no way to tell them apart.
Vocal homogeneity represents the core message of the album. Circles is about cycles and patterns, and it's for the people in them. Whenever given the chance to change, Mac hears his earlier self: "This is what it looks like, right before you fall," and thinks, "I cannot be changed, no, trust me, I've tried."
He wants things to be different and knows that it's his life, but can't find a way to get out of the hole he's dug for himself. "Got the cards in my hand, I hate dealin'," is a lamentation of something he can't change, and "I made it, but I hate once I build it, I break it, that might just break me down" is regret for what he could have done differently, but didn't. These two forces combine into the trap of Circles. You get yourself to where you are, and now you have an internal responsibility to keep going and not waste the incredible life you gave yourself. It doesn't make sense, though, because you're trapped by it. The reality your past self set up becomes inescapable for your current self, who becomes the past self in a week or two.
A lot of Mac's lines have dual meanings. You can read the entire album as inward facing, but you can also read it as an outward attempt to explain to someone else how he feels about himself. He hopes that his relationships with other people will help him manage things, and he seems to make a reference to Ariana Grande or Nomi Leasure, both of whom he had a very close relationship with: "All I ever needed was somebody with some reason who can keep me sane." He needs a kind of connection where he can feel understood, so he looks for it in other people, since he doesn't have that with himself. It's hard to express what that kind of absence feels like.
Of course, the last chord of the album is resolved by the first chord of the first song, making the entire thing one big circle and starting the cycle over again. Sound familiar? Yeah, a clock. "Like the hands that keep counting the time," he says. How about the song named "Hands"? Or the last song on the album, "Once A Day"? Oh, and of course, there are 12 songs on the album, one for each number on a 12-hour clock face. He's just highlighting the time that passes between the versions of himself.
Why do I find this album so beautiful? Well, Mac Miller took some really hard human emotions and put them to music. The music says things better than he can, and he knows that, so there are parts of the album where he doesn't bother talking, 'cause he'd ruin what the silence is trying to scream: "This is alright, don't worry about doing anything. Just let the time go by." I've had a couple of these silent moments lately, and they're really powerful. For a few minutes, I think I heard the silence whisper.
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A good sense of pattern detection is both a blessing and a curse. I notice the same cycles happening in my life repeatedly. Some of them are positive, and some of them are negative. I can guess at what causes them, and I do what I can to make them into ones that I'm excited to see again, but it is hard. I sometimes feel kind of stuck.
I think one line from "Good News" makes very acute sense to me: "I'm so tired of being so tired. Why you gotta build something beautiful just to go set it on fire?"
I think I am tired of being tired. I don't know how to express myself well enough to make anyone else understand how I feel, but I don't know how to fix that. I feel like I come across as overly critical of the world, and maybe I am, but it's one of the only ways I can make sense of what confuses me. I'll trim off the criticism as I realize that it's okay.
As far as I've recently become aware, I do feel things. I even feel what most people refer to as emotions, and I've felt a lot of them this week. Normally, I'd prefer not to feel them, so I ignore them. Unfortunately, I can't help it this time, even though it's just another cycle that I've seen before. It's discouraging when the same things break every time you think they'll change, and I think that's what Mac Miller was getting at. I hate that I can't say what I mean when I'm in front of people and that what I try to say comes out wrong. I hate that I can't tell people how I really feel. I hate that writing emails and poetry are the only methods that give me some semblance of an ability to convey meaning with words. Okay, maybe I don't hate it, but I wish I could speak like I write. That would be nice. I'd be practically unstoppable. While we're at it, I wish that I could let people read my mind and understand how I feel, because that would be so much easier than trying to ramble on about how I see things. I wish there were more silences where things made sense because there was nothing to make sense of. I wish I could point at the stars more often and think about nothing other than the space between. I wish that the hands that count the time would hold mine on their way past, just so I knew when they were gone. Ew, that was a little poetic. Enough of that.
I don't want to say too much because this doesn't feel like the right setting, but I will say this: fighting yourself sucks. A lot of people do it, and you probably don't realize how dramatic it is.
(Again, I'm alright. I promise. These are just my reflections on the last couple of weeks and what I've been thinking about, and writing them down helps me figure them out. Seriously. Do not call Therapeutics Anonymous, as that would be a waste of their emergency resource department. Plus, they probably wouldn't be impressed by your case.)
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Anyway, enough emotional sob story blah blah blah. In other news, my hackathon is going really well. The school is very supportive and we have enough of a reason to think it'll actually happen. A significant BYU figure has agreed to do the introductionsa and welcome everyone to the competition. I'm excited to see how it goes. We might even get state government involved, which would be great news for the quantum ecosystem here (and for the stability/longevity of our event).
Research is good, I'm working on the actual data part now, so maybe soon I'll be able to predict the fires that have claimed Utah's drier areas this week. Wouldn't that be cool? I've got 2D simulator engine working. It currently runs on quantum principles, but the computer still does the computation. In the future, we'll hand off the calculations to nature through the use of a quantum computer. I'm slowly getting used to full 40-hour weeks.
I've really enjoyed a book I'm reading, and I think I'll be done with it by the time I write another email. It's about probability, but it's written in an engaging style that makes the topic usable and understandable for people without prior training. I'll talk about that next time.
I think that's all I've got to say, so I'm going to go to sleep. Well, I'm gonna wait for my laundry to finish, then drive home, then go to sleep. #freelaundryatmom's
Sorry for the novel,
william
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