Let's see how far we've come... (the epic conclusion)

Looking back through my blog, I realize there is a lot of complaining about how much I dislike blogging; yet here at the end as I write a conclusion, I don't dislike blogging that much. In fact, I have come to enjoy it a lot. That may not be a surprise to anyone who has already discovered their joy for blogging, but I never thought I would experience it.

Turns out it's kinda fun to write about whatever you would like and post it for the world to see; there is something fulfilling about having people comment on and qualify the things you say, not only for you but for the world to see as well. 

I honestly think my favorite thing about blogging was being able to tell a story or share an experience and make it very personal despite being on a virtual forum. The use of bold words for emphasis and pictures to go along with a story made it that much more fun to tell and that much more personal.

Not only was it fun; blogging kept me writing, even just a paragraph, throughout the semester. I always forget just how much I love to write, and constantly writing on a blog was no exception.
It's also helped me chronicle things I have learned throughout the semester and don't want to forget; it really has been like an online journal. The last couple months I have gone through a lot of personal growth, more than one normally does through such a short span. There have been a lot of humbling, disappointing, and stressful things. I have also been incredibly blessed, and had many fun and exciting times. Through it all I really feel I have grown up more and become a little wiser about the world. Just maybe you can see it through my posts; if not that's ok, because I can.
I realize one of the points of this blog had been to figure out my major. Definitely didn't happen, but I'm still working on it.

I hope anyone reading enjoyed this blog as much as I did (doubtful, yet i can still hope.)

It might have been tedious, or whining, but I hope somehow in there it made people smile. One of my favorite quotes goes 

"Happiness is contagious; spread the disease."

I think it's a pretty good adage to live by.

It's the small things.

 This is a picture of myself, my three roommates and two of my best friends. Tonight we had tickets to go to the First Presidency Christmas Devotional in the conference center in Salt Lake. As you can see from this picture taken on the escalators inside the conference center, we were pretty excited about the opportunity.

It's things like this, being able to go sit in the same room as the prophet and his counselors and listen to them speak, that make living in Utah and putting up with the cold, worth it for me.

The speakers were wonderful and the MoTab performed beautifully. Afterwards, the girls and I spent an hour freezing as we wandered around temple square looking at all of the lights. For anyone who has never gone to see them, I have to highly recommend that you go, soon. It was the perfect way to get into the holiday spirit, but also to slow down and breathe through all the stress that comes with finals being a week away. 

It's the small things, like being with friends who love you and can always make you smile, or putting up with the bitter cold to see some twinkly Christmas lights, that remind me why life is so worthwhile.

Even with finals coming up.

Maybe, just maybe.

Tonight I was in the library, having no social life and studying (thank you finals), when I felt someone grab my shoulder. Pulling out my headphones and turning around, I recognized an old friend from the past who immediately put a grin on my face.
"JAMES!" I shouted, in the loudest acceptable whisper for the periodicals section of the library, and slapped a high five with him. "How's it going?!"
He grinned back and we exchanged pleasantries for a minute before he admitted that he couldn't find his roommates and asked if he could join me at my table since I was alone (like I said, no social life.) I agreed and he pulled out the chair next to me.
Now this story doesn't seem to be very relevant, unless you know that James is the boy I had an unbelievably huge crush on for an embarrassing number of years growing up.It was the kind of puppy love that had me drawing his name with little hearts around it in my notebook in high school.The kind of adoration that made me go speechless and shy when I was around him. The kind of thing that's a little humiliating to all live up to now.
After his mission I knew he'd come to BYU and despite being much older I though I still fostered just a little of that affection for him. Yet we sat two feet apart in the library for two hours tonight, talking and laughing occasionally at old jokes or funny YouTube videos while we took a study break; I remembered how much fun he is, but didn't get any of the old mushy feelings I had been expecting. He's still attractive and easy to talk to, just like I remember, but I can have a conversation with him now that doesn't consist of me trying to impress him and giggling hopelessly. It was enormously refreshing. 
When he finally packed up his Macbook, smilingly said good-night and walked away tonight, I knew I was a changed girl. The boy I was once hopelessly in "like" with is now just an old friend from back home; more than almost anything else that has happened lately, including the second job, tonight showed me just how far I've come in my life. It probably doesn't seem like that big of a deal at all to anyone, nor should it; this is one of those thing's that's extremely personal.
It showed me that maybe, just  maybe, I'm starting to grow up.

Personal Narrative Draft (just a day late, but better than never.)

On the Worst Possible Night

            “Guys, did you hear?” asked the girl sitting across from me as I slid into my seat in photography class. It was the Monday morning after senior prom; the bell had barely rung to announce the start of another school day and already gossip was flying through the air. I smiled and began pulling out a folder while students all over the classroom, eager to hear the news, turned in our direction, leaned expectantly toward my neighbor, and asked the inevitable “what?”

            “So while my date and I were in line Saturday night for prom pictures, this girl in the line ahead of us just passed out.”

            I froze with the folder halfway out of my backpack, not daring to look up yet.

            “Yeah, I think that she went to the hospital! Someone said she hit her head pretty hard.”

            “I heard she got so drunk before prom even started, she passed out here at school.”

            “I wonder who it was?”

            The last one I heard, that question, made me sit up straight and finish pulling out my folder while a slow grin crept over my face. “I know who it was.” Everyone in the room went quiet and suddenly all my classmates and even the teacher were looking my way. With what had to have been a sheepish look, I admitted “Guys, that was me.”

            Early Saturday morning I woke up, expecting to feel the normal excited buzz that came with the knowledge prom was just a couple hours away. Not just any prom either: this was my senior prom. Yet as I swung my legs out of bed I realized something was wrong; my head felt fuzzy, and my stomach hurt. But anticipation for the night ahead made me brush it aside.

            As the day wore on my hair, make-up and nails started coming together, but I didn’t. At a point I realized something was really wrong. Yet I was determined that whatever bug  or virus I’d caught, too bad for them because I was a seventeen-year-old girl who was not going to miss prom. That’s the state my mom found me in on the couch, wearing sweats and an old tee shirt, right as my date was knocking on the door. With a lot of stalling on her and my dad’s part, I managed to sneak over to my bedroom and change while they kept my date occupied.

            Walking out of my room I had never felt so great; I loved my crazy floral-print mermaid dress and it looked awesome; my hair was perfect. My date gave me an appraising once-over, then raised his eyes to mine and beamed. Instead of beaming back, I suddenly knew I was about to throw up. Luckily for me I ran to the bathroom, because that’s exactly what happened.

            Twenty minutes later, despite having thrown up three more times, we were headed to the high school, where everyone met to take pictures and load onto the buses that would bring us to the actual prom location.. My date and I slapped high fives or ran to hug other friends, respectively, as we made our way to the line of done-up teenagers snaking from the gym where pictures were. We found our group laughing and joking, so we joined them while we waited. In the stone corridor connecting the gym and hallway I suddenly found myself getting dizzy and everything started spinning. With concern, my date grabbed my hand and asked repeatedly, “are you ok?” Every time I smiled and replied that of course I was, although I clearly was not. He was unconvinced; yet being a teenager heard a funny comment and turned away from me, laughing, then turned back as he felt my hand leave his in time to see me hit the floor, unconscious.

            Waking up on the cold, dusty gym floor is not a pleasant experience to have, especially when immediately afterwards you find yourself throwing up into a nasty king-sized school trash can. It was a confusing scene, with my date holding my hand and face while asking “are you ok? What can I do? What do you need?”; behind him a friend and her parents were watching me like a hawk ( as I later learned, her dad- who is the size of a bouncer- was the one who carried me into the gym after I passed out); nearby I saw another friend crying hysterically, wailing something about me dying. Then the principle lurking nearby saw that I was awake.

             “Don’t worry sweetie, the ambulance is on the way!”

            At that, I balked. I was still throwing up but I was not going to leave the high school in an ambulance. I had my date call my parents, who showed up and convinced the principle that they would just take me home and that the hospital wasn’t really necessary. I managed to stop throwing up long enough for my date and I to take the requisite arms-around-each-other prom pictures, and then we made a quick escape.

            I spent senior prom night, what felt like the pinnacle of my four year-long social life, on my couch with my prom date watching Remember the Titans. I was devastated. Over and over I apologized to him until finally he said “Kaley, it’s really not that big of a deal. Life goes on.”

            As I lay there eating saltine crackers and trying not to lose them, I thought I might be holding the hand of the wisest seventeen-year old boy on the planet. Until this point I had never really thought about what would happen after high school; after receiving my diploma, there was this giant blank in my mind. Because of that, I had built high school and all the events in, like prom, up so much that when something went wrong, like missing prom, it felt like my whole life fell apart. And food poisoning wasn’t very fun, but I also had a true gentleman there keeping me company. Suddenly I smiled, glad that not everyone was as shortsighted as me.

            “Your right; it does.”

                

New Job and New Outlook!

SO I want to talk a little about my life on the job because at the moment it's incredibly exciting and quite honestly I want to share it! Sounds like the perfect start for a BLOG POST. 

This story starts the Tuesday of Thanksgiving week when I got a call 

from the zumiez store manager saying I'd been hired as a seasonal sales associate there! (For anyone who is wondering, Zumiez is a board/clothing shop. We have one at the Provo Town Center mall, and the one I now work at, located in the University mall. It looks like this:)

My first day was Black Friday, and I have to say it was extremely intimidating. I'd had about 2 hours of training when I showed up Friday and they said "GO!" Zumiez is a very sales-driven company and in order to do well there your expected to meet a certain sales goal every day. Black Friday, I failed woefully. It was, in fact, a spectacular failure.

My second day of work was today and I was nervous, expecting it to go about like how the first day had gone. This was depressing since I already have a job I'm not too fond of (if your familiar with any of my other posts, that would be the MTC cafeteria worker one.) Especially scary was when I showed up and found it was just me and my manager scheduled for a couple hours; I was positive this day would go just awful. But it turned out to be great! The job didn't get easier today, but my manager took the time to sit me down and train me. He might have taught me how to ring customer's purchases up on the cash register while he was shouting from across the store on a ladder while getting another customer shoes, but it worked surprisingly well.

After he taught me the basic skills of doing my job, the manager set me loose to see what I could sell. At this point I was surprised to find how much a lot of my classes have helped prepare me to be a sales associate. To sell to a customer you have to be able to approach them and start a conversation, experience for which my Mission Prep class has well prepared me. I was extremely grateful for how much easier the practice as a missionary made going up and talking to people in the store. 

Another tactic needed to be a salesperson is good communication skills, which I've gained from every english or writing class I've ever taken, present Writing 150 class included. At some point this semester prof. Steadman told me in my writing I needed to cut out all the unnecessary things and get to the point of what I was trying to say. I was amazed at how well that worked when applied to a sales pitch too. 

At the end of the shift, I had not only met my sales goal but had doubled it. As I walked out of the store my manager slapped me a high five and simply said "girl you killed it today!"

It was a pretty great feeling.

The hard part now is that this job at zumiez is only seasonal, unless I do as good every day as I did today. Until I know if I'll keep this job, I'm keeping my MTC one so I can pay to continue going to school full-time. Sounds pretty fun, huh. But it's amazing the difference there is between a job i don't like much and a job I'm already loving. 

Lesson of the day: for the things we love, it takes a little and sometimes a lot of sacrifice. But to me, I think it's a sacrifice worth making.

Fall-ing through the semester...

Although when I meet people I introduce myself as being from southern California (and it's true), I don't live on the beach, have movie stars for neighbors, or own a mansion and small fortune. I grew up in a small city in the middle of the desert where there are more tumbleweeds than almost any other sort of vegetation. Coincidentally, I've never had a pile of leaves big enough to jump in when fall rolled around. Also, being in the desert we go straight from blazing hot summer summer to chilly winter with about a week in- between.

You could say I've never really experienced fall.

So here at BYU in the midst of classes and midterms and what seems like endless nights studying in the library, I've found a blessing in the changing of the leaves and cooling temperatures. Although I'm rather adverse to the cold, I love this season. Walking through campus and being able to kick leaves out of my way and see the gorgeous reds and yellows is new and kind of fun. It brings back a sense of nostalgia for things i never had.

This was my view one day walking home from the testing center. What a blessing right next to my least favorite building on campus. The days are passing by, and you could say that I've just been
                                                                       falling
                                                                           through the
                                                                                    semester....

Just sayin'. and Chivalry.

It's a definite possibility that I have the greatest boyfriend in the world. Just sayin'. He brought me flowers today just because, which in my opinion is one of the best reasons to do it. As wonderful as that was, and despite it being the opener for this post, it's not my subject matter. Instead, I wanted to have a reflection on chivalry.


 Chivalry is gallantry, courtesy, or honor, or the demonstration of any of these qualities (that's not a precise definition, as the true one involves knights and horses; but for the purpose of this blog I went with something a little more modern and recognizable.)
Many people say that chivalry is dead in our society and that there are no more gentlemen. 
I beg to differ.
I see many examples of chivalry every day; the most frequent one is on campus, while walking through any doorway, I rarely have to open the door myself. Guys always do it, for which I'm sure to say thank you every time. Just as important as men observing the courtesies dictated by chivalry, is ladies remembering their manners and acknowledging when a boy or man does something nice.
Perhaps my interaction with gentlemen is skewed; since I attend BYU it's likely that we have a disproportionate number of gentlemen at my university.
But at work tonight, I saw another example of chivalry that I was personally glad for. It was just myself, a guy sales associate, and our manager closing the store for the night. Around midnight the manager approached us saying one of us could now go home, but the other would need to stay with him until he was finished closing. Without hesitation my co-worker told the manager to let the lady go home, and that he would stay. He also walked me to the mall entrance and watched to make sure that I made it to my car. Although we work together we don't know one another very well, and this simple gesture really touched me. It was thoughtful and incredibly gentlemanly.


From boys who open doors to ones who bring you flowers for no reason at all, I know that there is still chivalry out there. I have faith in society that there is still that much good in us.