Hair cut

Today I got a hair cut and then went on a run. I ran to a park and did quick laps around the park with short rests between them, trying to run each lap faster than the previous.

On one of these laps I sprinted toward the finish line, which was a giant pole with lights mounted at the top. A bird atop this light fixture showed true marksmanship with moving targets. He delivered a sticky white substance to the top of my head just as I crossed the finish line. I shook my fist and challenged him to a gentlemanly duel, but he smugly ignored me. We both knew he had already won. I ran two more laps, defiant of his attempt to make me quit early.

On my way home I ran by a friend from an old ward. She said something nice about my hair cut. She was too short to see the top of my head.

"So... um... please explain what caused you to start a blog."

Gladly.

"The Most Horrible Day of My Life"

Vocational tip

The other day, out of nowhere, my friend suggested that I move to California and become a dolphin trainer.

Maybe I can blame some of my bizarre behavior on my awesome and peculiar friends. Or does the possibility of me becoming a dolphin trainer seem reasonable to you?

Pointless Inventions

In case you were too busy laughing to read the scrolling white text at the bottom: "The ultimate patent pending machine that will change our country from a fat one to a fit one."

How is this better than, say, running? Is adding that much weight worth keeping my shoes from touching real pavement?




I don't get it. Who comes up with this stuff? Who buys it? Am I working way too hard to earn money?

Dating With Lazy Evaluation

I regularly apply engineering principles to everyday life. It's my effort to try to demystify complicated and incomprehensible things like dating. It doesn't seem to help much, but it is entertaining to me and the nerds I share it with. This blog's captive audience, if existent, might have a low trekkie to socialite ratio. That ratio may go up after nerdy posts like this. Oh well.

"In computer programming, lazy evaluation (or delayed evaluation) is the technique of delaying a computation until such time as the result of the computation is known to be needed. The actions of lazy evaluation include: performance increases due to avoiding unnecessary calculations..." -Wikipedia

Lazy evaluation is pretty cool. You don't do something until you are sure that it is necessary.

Yesterday my friend called me to tell me a funny story. Friend has told me many times about Girl, who is replete with attractive qualities. He hasn't yet succeeded in going out with her, though he has tried a time or two. Friend knew that Girl worked on the day of a very expensive concert. He didn't have tickets, and they've been sold out for a long time. Never having succeeded in asking her out, and knowing about her work that day, he almost jokingly invited her to the concert.

Friend: "So do you have to work on Thursday?"
Girl: "Yeah, why?"
Friend: "Darn. I was going to invite you to __________. "
Girl: "Well, I could shift things around!"

My friend is now committed to the date. He will probably end up spending over a hundred dollars getting the tickets on eBay, though she assumes that he already has them. Rather than laugh at him, I admire his genius. He's using lazy evaluation with his date! He didn't bother getting the tickets until he knew it was worth the effort. If it makes computers more efficient, it should do the same for dating, right? Besides, having very expensive tickets and nobody who wants to use them with you... that problem stinks. I would know.

UPDATE: He spent $100 on each of two front row tickets. She backed out two hours later. *mutters something about fickle women*

Funny Dialogue In The Last Week

"Bryan you ARE a literary genius and should have gone into English." -The only person who has admitted to reading this blog


"I've got game." -My Dad


As I walked to campus, I was approached by a girl I had never seen before.

Girl: "James! You're back! How are you?"

James, huh? How is it that other people can remember names but not faces? You clearly don't know James all that well. This could be fun...

Bryan, in his best I-think-I-remember-you-too-but-help-me-out-here voice: "Hey!"

Girl, catching the slight question in my response: "I'm Lindsey, remember? How are you? Where did you serve again?"

I'm going to come clean with her in a moment anyway. Let's just throw things out until I get something wrong and she realizes that I'm an imposter.

Bryan: "I'm good! I just got back from Brazil three months ago. How have you been?"

Lindsey:"Really? Brazil? I forgot that - I thought it was Asia or something. Cool! Have you seen Justin?"

Bryan: "Well, both Asians and Brazilians are short and eat rice. I haven't seen hardly anyone from our freshman ward, but of course I've seen Justin!"

Lindsey: "You guys were hilarious."

Bryan: "Yeah, it's too bad I'm one of those boring return missionaries now. Enclave Village just isn't quite the same as Helaman Halls."

Lindsey: "Really? Did you hang out there much? I never left Heritage that whole year."

*I begin laughing, regretting my lapse in impromptu acting skills. I explain myself, apologize, and Lindsey turns red.*



A guy came up to me to discuss his efforts to date my friend. He wanted me to find out how his efforts were going. I already had this information (that she wasn't really interested), but I had been asked to keep quiet about it, so I did. There was not a drop of sarcasm in anything he said to me afterward.

Guy: "You know, man, you've got to start with one girl, get some confidence going, and then drop her for someone better! It's kind of like a ladder. I've done it a few times, and I'm to the point that I can get pretty much any girl that I want."

Wow. I'm suddenly inspired to encourage my friend (who you aren't getting so easily) to go for you.

Guy: "Yeah, bro, I'll help you out too! Yeah, I've been thinking about you, man! You've just gotta get yer hair together into a Mohawk with some mousse and some hairspray. Then we'll get you some skater shoes and you'll see the difference, bro! We're gonna turn you into a ladies' man!"

Wow. Thanks, "bro."

Tired

Yesterday at church someone asked Bryan how he had been. The week was full of many forms of woe, but Bryan didn't particularly care to discuss any of them. His hesitation to respond, however, precluded a very convincing "good." He settled for another more truthful word: "Tired." This answer satisfied both honesty and privacy.

Walking away, Bryan thought about the root of that word. Graphically:

"Tire"

"Tired"

He realized just how spot-on his answer had been, albeit unintentionally. And he may never see that word quite the same way again.

Later that night, feeling tired about a lot of things, he received some advice concerning one of them from an old friend with whom he hadn't spoken in a very long time.

"Maybe tonight you can WILL her to come into your life. Instead of counting sheep, visualize the girl of your dreams running toward a white picket fence, then hurling herself over into a heap on the other side. Then she gets up and runs around to do it all over again. Poor dream girl. Pretty soon she will be so crumpled that she will have no choice but to appear to you in reality so she no longer has to endure the torture in your subconscious. Just a thought." -Lanelle

Bryan laughed, and laughed, and tried to sleep, and laughed some more. In his first class this morning, the professor commented three times on how Bryan kept smiling and laughing during the lecture, when neither he nor any other student in twenty years had found signal field graph modeling quite that entertaining. Eventually Bryan became slightly concerned that this mental image should probably cease to amuse him so, but then he squashed out the concern and laughed again.

Random Photos

On the way to school yesterday, Bryan saw a chicken.

Domesticated Fowl in Provo

It reminded him of mission conversations about how much he would miss seeing chickens randomly in the street. It always seemed a miracle to him that on a Uruguayan street with 37 starving dogs, a chicken could calmly strut around all of them without being hurt.

Today at the BYU football game, Bryan saw him:

There he is!

And then Bryan's life was seriously endangered. Probably inspired by the most violent of video games, Mario Kart, some hardened criminal attempted to cause a serious wreck as Bryan pulled out of the his parking garage. Were it not for his extremely acute senses, this could have been a tragedy.

Recipe for disaster

FHE Group Info

Bryan's roommate Brendan recently created a Facebook group to help coordinate FHE. The night that he created it, it looked like this:

They laughed pretty hard when they saw it. They've also been the only members of the group for several weeks now.

Appropriate Career Fair Dress

Bryan has always enjoyed a minor breach of protocol when he can get away with it. He's sort of in denial about being a conformist, and he uses any minor contravention of societal norms as indisputable evidence that he's not a lemming. And what could possibly be more rash and rebellious than not dressing up for a career fair? If a company doesn't hire him because he was wearing slacks and a polo shirt, he probably didn't want to work for them anyway. Engineers don't ever dress up, so why should wannabe engineers have to? Besides, most hiring teams are made of engineers who find formal dress no more important than washing one's hands after eating a bag of Cheetos.

At last week's career fair, however, Bryan wasn't seeking an engineering job. He was looking for a job for a friend - an English graduate. How exactly was it different? Impress HR instead of nerds? Could he get away with the same protocol when seeking something so different? Should he actually dress up, despite being little more than a resume paper boy?

These questions caused Bryan to spend a full five seconds looking at his closet, pondering what clothes to wear. Even unseen by others, this eternity planning clothes caused Bryan to feel entirely too feminine. He was beginning to feel hypocritical for years past when he mocked his sister for planning her "outfit" the night before. Seeing wrinkles in his dress shirt, he hastily concluded that he'd just go with casual pants and a polo shirt. The tan pants on the top of the stack were selected. Made of thin cotton, they always reminded him of a video once shown by an earth science substitute teacher in middle school describing appropriate apparel for harsh desert conditions. Somehow they are better than shorts. Thus Bryan left for the career fair with the confidence that he was not only differentiating himself from everybody dressed in suits, but that he was also at least twice as appropriately dressed for the Sahara.

As he swaggered through the entrance to the career fair, he found his way impeded by a stern girl in a blue vest. "You hafta put one of these on. Put your name and your major on it," she said sternly, handing him a rectangular sticker. Annoyed at such an unreasonable request, Bryan mentally calculated his chances of being able to force his way past her (rather good) and not cause a scene (not as good - she looked stubborn). Probably not worth it. But what to put on this sticker? His own name, or that of his friend? His own computer engineering, or her English? Not wanting to explain either a sex change or a dramatic change of study to those he knew, he settled on the former.

It got easier after that. "My friend writes good," and "My friend's resume. She be good editor." Professionalism was second nature.

Some time later Bryan left, got lunch, went to the library, attempted to do homework, walked home, and gave a friend a ride. At about five thirty in the evening he went to the bathroom in his apartment and made a remarkable discovery. There was a six inch tear in the seat of his pants.

What Rafiki would look like wearing these pants.

This post's poignant sapience: Desert-ready thin cotton pants have a finite duration. Use sparingly.