Settling In: My Adventures In The BYUbble

I've finally moved to Utah, which means several things:

1) I'M LIVING WITH SUPERWHOLOCKMARAUDER AND SMILEY AND THE UNKNOWN ROOMMATE (who will hereafter be referred to as Button, because she's cute as a button) AND NOW I CAN WATCH DOCTOR WHO AND SHERLOCK AND BE ON TUMBLR AND HAVE PEOPLE KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT AND EXPERIENCE ALL THE FEELS ALL THE TIME. Not that I didn't do this at home, but I'm sure there were moments where my family thought I had completely lost it. Heck, there are moments when I think I've completely lost it.

2) I DON'T EVEN HAVE TO BABYSIT P.M. EVER AGAIN. I AM JUST SO HAPPY RIGHT NOW YOU HAVE NO IDEA. I'll kind of miss the little girls, and maybe I can babysit them next summer. But I will make myself unavailable for P.M. and her family. And that is the last you will ever hear of P.M. Hopefully.

3) I'M GONNA START RUSSIAN ON MONDAY AND I ALREADY KNOW THE ALPHABET AND I AM JUST SO SO SO SO SO EXCITED LIKE PRIVYET AND DA SVEDANYA (but you say it dasvedanya like it's one word) AND JUST SLKDFIHSOIHBGISODFHIAFHOSHAOHO.

And I will admit that it's nice to dictate my own life a little more. I can decide what I want to eat (but don't worry, Mom, I'm eating healthy food like oatmeal and vegetables) and when I go to bed (I've only gone to bed after midnight like once in the last two weeks) and when I do laundry (not yet) and when I clean (don't need to yet). I can decide how and when I'm working. It's DELIGHTFUL.

But anyway, this post is about this week and the lovely week I've had. It really has been lovely. I kind of want to pinch myself to make sure that this isn't just a long daydream I've been having while babysitting P.M. (uggh, there she is again) and that I don't still have two weeks until I can go to college.

I got to come earlier than expected, because my grandfather died and all of my family except the Beauty, who had band camp, drove out to Utah to attend the funeral. It is a three-day drive from Red Lion, Pennsylvania to Logan, Utah. Three days where I was stuck in the car with my family. But that makes it sound like a bad thing- it's really the best thing there is. For example, we got to eat fast food after the first day and a half because we finished the two loaves of bread and the egg salad my mother had packed. We also had snacks- a lot of snacks. Lollipops, pretzels, and Oreos. Mmm mmm good. And then, of course, there was the endless claustrophobia of sitting in seventy-two square feet with five other people for three days- again, it sounds bad, and occasionally it was, but it was fun.

The Beast sat there playing video games, or trying, as the light flickering out of the windows made him ill, and watching movies.

I listened to the Broadway soundtrack of The Little Mermaid twice, read the last two Harry Potter books, and took several naps.

The Angel was quite content with staring at the road signs and asking "What state are we in?" every ten minutes.

 The Prodigy was a bit of a problem- he requires constant stimulation, because he gets bored, and he can't just take a nap whenever. Plus, whenever he said he was bored, the Beast began to tease him, and then everyone's lives were made unpleasant by incessant whining and the Beast's strangely-high pitched giggling at his own amusement.

But seriously. I watched Fletch, which is an awful movie but a funny one, with the Beast as we drove into Chicago on the first night to my aunt's house. That day I'd been reading Half-Blood Prince and crying a little at Dumbledore's death and stuff. We got to my aunt's house and we spent the night there. In the morning, my aunt, two of her daughters and her children, and her son joined us on the open road- we were caravaning, which meant we moved a little slower, because my first cousins once removed were having issues with potty breaks and such things. You know, the perks of traveling with small children. But my dad said that it didn't really matter- as long as he got enough sleep before he drove again he didn't mind how long it took us to get places. We spent the next night in Grand Island, Nebraska, and the next day, a long one, we finished Nebraska, crossed Wyoming, and made it to Utah. Booyah.

I'm going to pass over the funeral because that's sort of my own business. I will say that my grandfather was a wonderful man, and these past few years had been difficult for him and for all of my family because he had Alzheimer's and dementia and didn't recognize us very well. But when he was lucid, he was one of the best men I have been privileged to know, to have been related to. He was the most Christlike man I have ever known, and he left behind many people who loved him, who mourned his passing but also celebrated his life and the things he accomplished, and I hope that when I die I will be half as loved as my grandfather, Robert Gaylen Allen. Rest in peace, Grandpa.

After the funeral, I got a haircut from my uncle, and my hair is short again. I sort of love it to death, and it's ridiculously attractive. The rest of me could use some work, but I know that my hair will always look nice. The next day I went home with another aunt for the weekend, an aunt who lives in Riverton, Utah. I stayed there and I did help pick broccoli the one time but I was kind of lazy and I felt guilty about it, but I was madly applying for jobs and that hard work paid off, because I GOT A JOB INTERVIEW. On Monday, my cousin drove me down to Provo and I went to the job interview first, because that was from nine to eleven in the morning. Then I went to my apartment and we moved in just after slash at the same time as Superwholockmarauder, and that was kind of the best thing ever. I unpacked all my stuff. The next day I was informed that I had a job, that I would be making sandwiches at the crack of dawn every day before school starts. ALL RIGHT! The next day, Smiley moved in, and Superwholockmarauder and I and her mom went to see The Bourne Legacy, and I had never seen any of the Bourne movies before, but it was okay, because I understood the plot just fine. And may I say Jeremy Renner. Holy hopping son of a Bludger, he is attractive.



See what I mean?

And then the next day I worked for the first time and I helped assemble (AVENGERS) but also four thousand boxed lunches for starving freshmen at NSO. If you're a friend of mine, and you go to BYU, and you're a freshman, and you ate a lunch yesterday with a ham and cheese sandwich on a bagel. deli pasta salad, and a banana, I would like you to know that I PUT THE BANANA IN THE BOX AND CLOSED IT. I DID. It was a thrilling life moment.

And then yesterday I didn't work, which I was sort of worried about, because I should have worked, right? But nobody emailed me about when I was supposed to work, because I emailed my supervisor twice and he never got back to me. PLEASE LET ME STILL HAVE A JOB. Like seriously, I am quite worried.

And then today I had lunch with my friend L, if you remember her from like the first or second post I made, who has her own blog Pride and Narratives (http://www.pride-and-narratives@blogspot.com, I think, but it's close enough if not) and we talked about crazy things like ferrets and fanfiction and stuff. And I ran into my long-lost cousin in the bookstore, and I call her that because she lives in Washington and I never see her like ever, and it makes me sad. But I saw her today and I am quite pleased about it. And I bought a notebook for my writing class that I'm covering and decorating, so I'm happy with that, too. Today has just been a good day all around. Speaking of which: HAPPY FREAKING BIRTHDAY, JOHN GREEN!

I am a proud Nerdfighter. I get excited to obsess about Supernatural, Doctor Who, Sherlock, Harry Potter, Firefly, the Avengers, and everything. I go see movies and I visit old friends. Frankly, this whole week, starting with my successful job interview on Monday morning up until this day, now, with this blog post, has been one heaping spoonful of jam on my little slice of bread. In fact, it's raspberry apple jam, which my recently widowed grandmother sent with me to college. Raspberry apple jam is THEBOMBDOTCOM, in case you were wondering. If something is really really good, that's gonna be raspberry apple jam. This week has been raspberry apple jam.

The Reasons Enumerating Why The Next Two Weeks Will Not Pass Quickly Enough

So the title of this post expresses some givens which I will have to explain in order to explain the reasons why they are givens. These givens are:

1) Something EXCITING and generally positive is going to occur within the next two weeks. This thing is my return to college in Provo, Utah, at Brigham Young University. I will be a sophomore, for like one semester, and then my AP credits will have given me a friendly little bump up to be a junior, I think. So I only have seven semesters at college instead of eight, which is fine by me.

2) I am SO EXCITED for this to occur that the next two weeks are going to pass extremely slowly, to my mind. I hate to admit that I am one of those people who kind of lives for the next big thing- and I do try to enjoy life as it goes by, but I still wish that I wasn't always thinking about (what comes next, what comes next) because it distracts me from what's happening NOW. Like for example, my family and I went on a two-day vacation to a place in the Poconos called Camelbeach, which has this awesome water park with a wave pool and super tall slides because it's built on a mountain near the Camelbeach ski resort. This occurred in the first weekend of August; we left Thursday night, spent Friday at the water park, and went home on Saturday. It was fun. But I spent like three weeks of July going, I CAN'T WAIT FOR THIS VACATION and WHEN WILL THIS VACATION GET HERE and I JUST REALLY NEED THIS VACATION NOOOOOOWWWWWW and other such things. (This may or may not have occurred because of the awful job I mentioned in the one post... it made me long for the future a lot when I was there.)

So why is it, exactly, that I am so very very excited to go back to college?

Because college is FUN, that's why. It is. It is so fun. And while I loved college last year, I know I'm going to love it even more this year, because firstly I'm not going to be working at football games (unless I'm really, really desperate on the job front), so I can spend my Friday nights huddled up in my room being anti-social, and secondly because I live quite close to campus so I can still take the opportunities offered with living near to campus without having all the annoying rules to deal with, but lastly and mostly because I'm going to be living with two really awesome people and a third person who I hope is really awesome.

One of these people is my friend Superwholockmarauder. Yes, that is a wordy name. Yes, it is entirely fitting. Superwholockmarauder is my fanfiction buddy and my (website-that-shall-not-be-named-outside-of-itself) buddy and quite often my Pinterest buddy as well. We love most of the same books, we love most of the same fandoms, most of the same movies, some of the same music (quite a lot of it, I should think), and we're just kind of generally twinnish and it totally works. It's funny that I met her...

...and yes, I will allow this to digress into a story time. Okay. We lived in the same building on campus, and within our building our resident assistant was like, "Let's have a building sleepover/pajama party in the basement! Yeah!" And even though I am anti-social and somewhat ferociously shy, I was like, "Well, you have to make FRIENDS, Sarah," so I put on my elephant pajamas and I went. I did. And we get down there, and we play get-to-know-you games, and I'm sitting next to Superwholockmarauder before I even know her and we have this ball that the RA has with questions written on it and we throw the ball and catch it and the question that comes up is "What's your favorite T.V. show?" and she had the ball before me but I wasn't paying attention because I rarely watch T.V. I was like, "Wait, do I even HAVE a favorite T.V. show?" But then I remembered, "Oh, yeah, we have Doctor Who on boxed set, so it's T.V. but it's not T.V.,  because we don't watch it on cable." But the ball gets to me, and I say, "My favorite T.V. show is Doctor Who," and I pass the ball along real quick because I realized how incredibly nerdy and sort of not cool I sound, but then I see her face and my first thought was, "I can provoke a happy reaction from people?" and then she goes, "You like Doctor Who, TOO?" and I think, "FELLOW WHOVIAN! I AM NOT ALONE ON THE PLANET OF BYU!" and then she says, "You're my new best friend," and I was perfectly okay with this, because I had been vaguely worried about what people would think about my obsession with British science fiction. And it all turned out lovely.

But anyway, that was at the beginning of fall semester last year. Mid-September, maybe. And I had gotten a calling as a ward music chair, and I began getting to know people in the ward, and it was fun and stuff. And then we finally got our Relief Society put together, and then I get assigned a visiting teaching companion who turns out to be one of Superwholockmarauder's five roommates. And at first, like I am with most people, I was a little shy. But then, as we got to know each other, I learned that this girl, Superwholockmarauder's roommate, my visiting teaching companion and supervisor, was RIDICULOUSLY easy to talk to. And she was also incredibly confident and smart and pretty and funny, and she was just really happy all the time, and nice to everyone. And I admired her because I was like, "Okay, I am so not this cool," but then we became pretty good friends. I'm going to refer to her hereafter as Smiley, because when this girl laughs or smiles, she can always make me feel better about, well, everything. (And that, dear readers, is a rare quality indeed.) So I got to know Smiley on my own, through visiting teaching and stuff, and Superwholockmarauder was Smiley's roommate, and then Superwholockmarauder began inviting me down to their apartment to watch Doctor Who, because she had a Netflix account and she wanted to introduce it to Smiley. I went, quite willingly, and the three of us struck up a friendship, and it more or less turned out that Smiley and Superwholockmarauder invited me to come and live in an apartment with them the following year.

I accepted at once, because I wanted to move off-campus and I wanted nothing better than to live with people who were awesome and understood my crazy weirdness and my obsessions and who were willing to listen to me and who could share some of my enthusiasms. I liked my roommates from that year a lot, but we were just friends. We weren't like, soul mate friends. But Superwholockmarauder and Smiley evidently liked me well enough to invite me to live with them. And that was a new experience for me.

I mean, I had friends in high school. I had very good friends in high school. But I was never really sure if they liked me because we did the same stuff and I was around them a lot or because they actually liked ME the person. It turns out that most of them did, for which I was surprised, pleased, and grateful. But with Superwholockmarauder and Smiley, I didn't have to worry about that. I already knew they liked me and liked me a lot. If they hadn't, they wouldn't have asked me to live with them next year.

Of course, our apartment is a four-man (woman?) apartment, and there's an as-of-yet-unknown roommate who will be living with us. I have no idea who it is; maybe someone's just bought the contract from the landlady; maybe Smiley found someone in the nick of time (it is her bedroom that has the vacancy, after all); I dunno. But I'm not terribly worried about The Unknown Roommate. She'll at least be okay, you know? And if she's at least okay, then we can train her up in the ways of goodness and British television and Nerdfighters, and life will be good.

So Superwholockmarauder and Smiley and The Unknown Roommate are one reason I'm excited to return to BYU; another is that I am really, really bored.

Yes, you heard me; I am bored. It's summer, but I've had almost four months of summer. I am ready for intellectual stimulation. I'm going to start Russian 101 in the fall, in addition to THREE (count 'em, THREE) English classes. And a mandatory religion class. But I have Russian and English other than that and I am SO EXCITED about it because the three classes I have are English 292, English 293, and English 218. 292 and 293 are literature classes, and they cover British literary history from Milton to modern and American literary history. Also, the professors are in cahoots with each other so the projects will be planned around each of the other classes and we'll connect the two classes. It will be SO MUCH FUN. And 218 is a creative writing class, and I don't need to tell you that that will be fun, because I write ALL THE FREAKING TIME so it will be a breeze AND fun. And I really want to learn Russian because I have ancestors from Russia and stuff and it will be interesting, and (as the Olympics have aptly taught me) Russian men are quite attractive. But that reason is less important than the other ones.

And I just kind of want to get out of the house, too; when I don't work, I'm at home all the time. So I'll be excited to go and live somewhere where if I want to go to the store, really any store, it's like a five-minute walk. Good stuff. And I'll be with a lot of people my age, and that's always fun. And maybe (though probably not) I might go to church in a real church building. It's not probable, but it's possible.

Either way, these next two weeks won't pass fast enough! I'll have to do a lot of laundry and read all the Harry Potter books again to occupy my time. Oh, wait, I'm doing that. Well, one of those things. Guess which... hint: there are lots of clothes that need cleaned in my room. And I have to finish my work for my one job... and I have to APPLY for as many jobs as I can when I go back to school... and I have to take an OST... and I have to re-learn the Russian alphabet... and exercise... and make a list of things I need my mother to buy... so much to do! Okay, maybe those two weeks will pass faster than I thought, with all that stuff to do. And that, like everything I blog about, is jam on my life-bread.