Finished the Fight

This post really should have gone up two weeks ago, back when I walked for graduation. My parents came up to visit and I got to show them around a bit, and over all it was a great week. As my final semester of university came to an end, I got to thinking about all the great experiences I've had over the past five years. Going to BYU has brought on some radical changes in my life, and I feel like sharing some of the most important and/or most enjoyable parts of my college career. These are more or less in chronological order, and I apologize to anyone who happens to read this and notices something I accidentally left out.

I had a hard time socially when I first got to Provo. This was due mostly to undeveloped social skills, honestly, and that first year and a half after my mission was a seriously dark time for me. I did manage to make a few good friends, though, which made for some bright moments. The thing with the widest ranging effect has to be the time when Mariah borrowed Bang! and we formed my original Bang group with me, Bill, Mariah, Aaron, and Milko, along with a few others who came and went. This was also when we got the greatest line ever while playing the game: "I've got so many beers I could bang Alex all night long!"

Another bright moment was when that same group (minus Aaron and plus Jen) went on a road trip to Mariah's parents' place in Jackpot, Nevada, the tiniest town I have ever stayed in. The Jackpot 5 had some great times there fourwheeling (and going into ditches and breaking an arm) and such. I nearly didn't go on that trip, and when I decided to go I had some sort of mini-stroke and the right half of my body just stopped functioning. I still have no idea what was up with that, except maybe God was giving a visual example as Mariah had just been describing it to Bill since she had learned about it earlier that day. Like with most things of similar nature, I simply ignored it and then went on the road trip.

The most important part of this first portion of my college career actually occured the semester I wasn't taking classes. That's when I bought my camera and was finally able to spend time developing my abilities as a photographist. Photography is one of the things that brings me the most joy. I love the creativity involved, the chance to capture a moment to share with others.

Life got much better for me when I moved to the Riv the next year and really started on the long journey toward becoming a normal(ish) person. I moved there blindly with random roommates, but it's where I made many of my strongest friendships outside of high school. I spent two years there, and most of this list is from my time there. This is where ultimate frisbee became a major part of my life. I love that sport. I miss weekly frisbee nights.

After frisbee, Halo nights were one of the best things at the Riv, especially the second year when Pavio and I could leave the door open and yell over to David and Thunder's apartment. My favorite time will probably always be the time David wanted to play a team game on Coagulation with heavy vehicles like the tank. I immediately grabbed a tank and took out the other team's tank, and I got about half my team's kills before the other team managed to take me out. This was the inspiration for our most frequently played game type, Badical, which was designed primarily to prevent one team from getting control of all the rockets and making the team with the tank overly dominant (this was done by giving everyone random starting weapons). Eventually, Halo nights were more frequently 2v2 or 2v3 games, most of which Pavi and I dominated with awesome teamwork (and Pavi's awesome sniping).

Zoobynews was another great part of living at the Riv. Making these videos was just fun. My favorite is still the one in which we went in search of unicorns in Spanish Fork, though probably just because I got to develop my character a lot more in that particular episode. I wish we'd been able to develop the series more, and that I'd gone on to actually make the movie starring Boximus Prime and the Cymbal Monkey (two of the greatest Halloween costumes ever); we only had our one battle on campus.

Going to the Festival of Colors at the Hare Krishna temple was another top event of BYU life. The event has transformed into something huge these last couple of years, and I'm glad I got to see it before they could afford the more expensive dyes and started holding it twice to accomodate all the people that attend now. The Hare Krishna temple is also where they hold Llama Fest, which is intrinsically awesome.

BYU was actually involved in the changes that I made over my college career. Wilderness Writing was one of the more important classes for me. It's pretty encouraging when you have an English professor tell you he wishes he could write like you do, especially when that professor is one you sincerely love and respect. My favorite campout of the class was the one where I got lost. We had hiked deep into a canyon of the San Rafael Swell and it was growing dark when we realized that among the 18 or so of us we had two flashlights. We split into two groups, one of people running ahead to get to camp before it got too dark and another going slower with the flashlights. I started off in the fast group, but my knee suddenly started to hurt pretty bad, so I fell behind. This was shortly after I had passed Charla and Dana, who were arguing because Dana was pushing herself past safe levels of exertion trying to stay with the fast group. Anywho, I took the wrong path at some point, and started picking a path in the dwindling light through a marshy area to make my way to one of the more visible landmarks. I picked up the remains of a small tree and started using it as a walking stick. At some point I was forced to double back, and as I searched for a dry path I saw Dana and Charla picking their own path through the marsh. I figured it was a lot better for us to go together rather than separately, so I joined them and we made our way along the river, which would eventually lead us back to camp. At times the brush forced us away from the guiding river, and I took point as we followed cattle trails in the dark, using my tree to feel the ground out ahead of us (eventually though it got stuck in the heavy brush). We made it back to camp just as the rest of the class started sending out search parties for us.

The next semester is when I first attended Brandon Sanderson's SFF writing class at BYU. I had met Brandon the year before, shortly after he had gotten his first book published. I actually went to the class for three years running (and sadly still have not actually written the book I started that first year). Perhaps needless to say, he's had a decent influence on how I write, or at least how I think about writing. The most important thing I took from his class, however, is a pride in what I do. For years, I was embarrassed by the fact that I wrote fantasy. John Bennion had helped rid me of some of that embarrassment in Wilderness Writing, but it wasn't until Brandon's class that I really saw fantasy as a genre as legitimate as literary fiction, one that had unique challenges, one to be proud of.

When I started school, I really had no idea what I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted to major in something that I could enjoy well enough until I could turn writing into an actual career. It took me two years to decide on geography, and taht was basically because I'd gotten experience working with GIS at my summer job. Otherwise, geography was like so many other subjects I had dabbled in—intriguing, entertaining, but ultimately there was nothing really enjoyable I could do. But I needed a major, so I filled up my Fall 2007 semester with geography classes. Two important things came out of that semester. (1) I discovered urban planning, and (2) I got a job TAing for Dr Davis.

My friend Aaron had been trying to get me into urban planning for about a year already. Since I had become a geography major already, I decided to take him up on one of his meetings with the Students for New Urbanism. They happened to have a guest speaker that night, and he talked about how New Urbanism was a return to traditional planning—a move away from the automobile-dominated conventional development I had grown up with and back toward a people-scaled built environment, the way cities used to be. He got me thinking of the way New York started, and how it still is, how small towns grew into large cities yet remained local, with everyday needs in easy range on foot. It was everything I hated about life in Arizona countered by one of the things I loved most about life in New York, and I knew I had found a much better emphasis for myself (GIS would have killed me on the inside).

That first semester of geography classes I took all the basics, including 130 (Human Geography). Dr Davis got me analyzing geographic concepts in ways I had never done before. I liked it, so I asked if I could TA for him. Towards the end of the semester he saw how well I was doing in the class, and he gave me a job. TAing was one of the most time-consuming parts of college life for me, but I'm glad I did it. I learned a bit about writing (mostly by seeing what other people did wrong), for one thing, and I got to know Dr Davis a lot better than I otherwise could have. We both share a love for travel and for photography, though he's obviously had a lot more practice than I've had so far with both of those. He also got me to start looking at life more positively, if for no other reason than sometimes I looked overly tired and so had to learn to disguise that. He managed to boost my self-confidence, too, when he asked me to TA for him again after I took a semester off from work (due to a heavy school schedule), and I felt truly honored when he invited me to have Thanksgiving with his family this last year.

If I were to mention only one thing from my penultimate year, it would be playing hearts and Settlers (or whatever we felt like) with Pavi, Mollifer, and Taleah.

There are many more people and things that deserve mention here, but I think this post is bloody long enough. If you're reading this, you are probably one of those people. So thanks to all my friends who made college life great (even though I don't mention some of the most important people by name in this post). Because really, college life would be almost perfect without the college part. Thankfully, the war with school is over. I have finished the fight, and in no small part due to the people that have made such a large part of my life these last few years. Thanks, everybody!