Roman Holiday

Last night I couldn't sleep so I decided to watch the movie Roman Holiday.

For those of you unfamiliar with the movie here's a little break down:

The movie came out in 1953. It was Audrey Hepburn's first major role and the only film for which she ever won an Oscar. It's a romantic comedy from the Golden Age of Hollywood and a fine example of the postcard genre (a film shot on location capturing the beauty of some exotic place).

The story is about a princess who is fed up with being a princess so she takes a break and runs away. She gets picked up by a reporter played by Gregory Peck. He takes her around town hoping to get a story...and the rest you can probably imagine.

Now, I realize that runaway princess stories are overused. In fact, the princess market might be the only market more saturated than the vampire market...but luckily Roman Holiday isn't your average princess movie.

(Oh, and be careful cause I'm going to spend most of this post talking about the ending so if you're gonna see it you probably shouldn't read much more)

At first the story is very formulaic: the jaded journalist (Peck) sees dollar signs when he meets the princess. But, after a a few scenes of Audrey Hepburn being her incredibly charming and lovable self, Peck's character's interest shifts and becomes more than financial. This is, of course, very formulaic and it leads you to expect that the film will continue in the stagnant romantic comedy genre: 1) secret in relationship 2) relationship secret revealed 3) fight over secret 4) post fight regret causes realization of feelings for other 5) reconcile with new insight into love for other (usually through some thoroughly romantic gesture that depicts the uniqueness and fun of the relationship....then rinse and repeat.

Roman Holiday is a great movie because it gets derailed from this genre at step 2 and it never makes it to step 3. The two begin to care for each other, they eventually kiss (all of this according to the painfully predictable romantic comedy formula)....but then they share a sad parting and walk away from their magical day together. Their lives are both changed and invigorated because of their time together...but they're practical enough to know that their time together, as magical as it was, was just a day and that they now gotta get back to their real lives.

So, he drops her off at her place, they tearfully say goodbye, and they walk away with neither of them expecting to ever see the other again...but of course that's not the case (this may be a twist on the romantic comedy but it's still a romantic comedy) and they see each other the next day.

The next day Peck goes on assignment to a royal press conference. When the princess enters the room she sees him with his fellow reporters and her face pinches with concern. In front of everyone she realizes that she spent the previous day with a reporter who now has the makings of a very salacious story(a princess in a fist fight, spending the night in a strange man's apartment, getting arrested etc.).

Gregory Peck can see that she's shocked and a little scared when she sees him, but he's on the job so he can't tell her that because of his feelings for her he won't use their time together to sell newspapers, so he tells her that she can trust the journalists and he places extra emphasis on the word "trust." She looks relieved (she acts this very well and somehow looks relieved while also looking like she never lost her princessly calm). She walks up and meets the members of the press on the first row and shakes their hands. When she gets to Peck they share an extra warm handshake and she is given the pictures that he was originally going to use as evidence for his article. She smiles to herself when she sees them, tucks them away, and then moves on.

It's such a bittersweet ending. The last scene is amazingly acted. When they shake hands you know they want to say so many things to each other, but they can't cause of everyone else around them. Somehow both actors convey everything they'd want to say to the other beneath the surface: through tension in the eyes, a set to the jaw, a half smile. It is really impressive.

Roman Holiday is a great movie because the end doesn't give you what you want, it gives you what you should want. Both of the characters know that there are two many things separating them. They both know that they can't throw their lives away on a whim. They both know that they can't throw their lives away because of one special day--regardless of how magical that day may have been. And while they both know these things, we as viewers don't. We're so trained to want and expect a relationship to overcome anything, even if the result is damaging.

We enjoy watching a guy throw his career out the window through a bold declaration of love during a board meeting. We enjoy watching a woman spurn all suitors while she wastes the best years of her life waiting for a soldier that might never come home...

But these stereotypes are a little bit different from the love in Roman Holiday, because hopefully, at the very least, these relationships were older than a single day.

The ending to Roman Holiday doesn't attack love, it attacks whim. It attacks the idea that the course of an entire life should be abandoned because of what feels good rather than what one knows is right. It attacks the idea that love can exist between two people who act so selfishly that they'll allow the other person to become something less so they can be with them. At it's most fundamental level Roman Holiday attacks the idea that love exists outside of virtue rather than through virtue.

Anyway, back to the movie. So, they both say goodbye. Bound by their respective duties they part and we as viewers assume that the parting is permanent this time. Both of the characters have grown for their meeting. The princess is more possessed. She's more affirming. She is willing to take risks she never would have before. The reporter is now softer. He now sees that the value of another person goes beyond what he can get out of them.

And I think at heart this is what makes this a good story. Love should, ideally, make you a better person. The stamp of approval that we have for the love between these two is that at the end of the movie they are both better people. But this wouldn't have been possible if they'd been together at the end.

Because if they were together at the end then the princess would still be a whimsical girl who never took control of her life. And if they were together at the end then the reporter would still be a selfish man profiting from the princess's misfortune. But separate...letting the other go...that shows that they really did have noble feelings for the other. That shows that they did really fall in love in a single, wonderful day.

So, this single wonderful day, and the love it fostered, is why this movie is a classic. If they'd gone for the happy ending they'd have changed this movie from a classic love story to a forgettable fairy tale depicting forgettable fairy tale love. It would have removed the feeling of realism and forced a suspension of disbelief.

We'd all have gone along with it I'm sure. We'd have been happy and feeling all warm and fuzzy inside....but we'd also have known that that isn't how it would really have happened. We'd know that in our painfully realistic lives it wouldn't have turned out that way. We'd say "Oh, if only life were like a fairy tale, then I could have something magical like that happen."

So, while this hypothetically happy ending forces resolution, it also leaves us with the sad thought that the sort of chemistry and excitement we just saw only works out in a world where practical considerations are suspended....but Roman Holiday with it's slightly sad ending gives you something so much better than that. It depicts love outside of a fairy tale. It shows love happening in a real world where circumstances can take it away from you...and it reassures us that love can still be magical despite its brevity. Roman Holiday elevates cinematic love to something believable.

Roman Holiday is a beautiful movie because it shows the power and immediacy that love can have in spite of the frustrations and complications of life. But beyond that, and perhaps even more importantly, it shows how love makes people better, even when it's only for a day.

Triceratops

Today I read that some paleontologists in Montana are saying that the Triceratops might not have ever existed.

I need to vent a little on this.

I mean, when I was a kid I loved The Land Before Time, and while the "3 horns" were never as courageous or as kind as the more noble "long necks," they were contributed to the community..and I'd be lying if I said that Sarah never helped Littlefoot out of a scrape.

As a kid I'd spend hours pouring over dinosaur books...trying to figure out who would beat up whom. At the top of my list of pre-historic tough guys was the triceratops. I figured that the triceratops, along with the Tyrannosaurus, were the top dogs of the Jurassic world. I liked T-Rex way more than the triceratops, but I figured with Rex's puny arms and Trike's defensible armor made them a pretty fair match up.

(My plastic dinosaur toys re-enacted this battle many times. According to my scientific battle re-creations, in ancient times the T-Rex usually won the fight by picking the Triceratops up in its jaws and then throwing the Triceratops out of the planter and onto the sidewalk).

Anyway, all I'm saying is that this animal captured my imagination (and I'm sure the imagination of a whole bunch of other kids).

So the question is who do these childhood attacking scientists think they are? What gives them the right to take the triceratops away?

It feels sorta like a betrayal when they try to.

I mean, well, look at it this way. Dinosaurs are fascinating to a kid because they're like science-based dragons. When you're a kid anything big and tough and monstrous (as long as it's not hiding in your closet when you sleep) is awesome. And while it's fun to imagine a dragon, you always know in the back of your painfully pragmatic childhood brain that dragons don't really exist outside of stories.

...But Dinosaurs? Scientists in respectable lab coats tell us all about them. They tell us how big they are, what they would eat, and they give us bones to look at and point to so we can say "See! That existed. That's a fairy tale monster with scientific support!"

Anyway, given that dinosaurs are basically fairy tales that we were told we could believe in, and given that they keep telling us that some dinosaurs never existed....it's sort of destroying one of the things that make dinosaurs so fascinating...that they're something we can believe in.

Dinosaurs are amazing to kids because they're horrific and real.

When you're a kid and you're told that a dinosaur that was accepted as fact never existed, it puts a hole in the imagination. That hole creates a vacuum of cynicism that sucks the rest of the dinosaurs down the ontological toilet.

You can't say "Dinosaurs are real, oh, except that one we told you about... our bad. So, all those daydreams about that dinosaur...yeah, might as well have been about a unicorn."

Also, to make matters worse, we're being told the awful truth about the Triceratops right on the heels of losing Pluto as a planet....this is just too much.

Is there some sort of trend now to take away beloved childhood science? It's like scientists in the exploratory disciplines like astronomy and paleontology can't find anything groundbreaking and new so they're trying to create excitement by attacking iconic things with redefinition.

Well, I say let's get ahead of the game and beat them to it.

Did you know that the big red "eye" of Jupiter really isn't a storm?

Yup, it's just a huge crater because, unlike Earth, Jupiter doesn't have a crack team of oil drillers in space suits lead by Bruce Willis to protect it from rogue meteors.

The pterodactyl? Yeah, it couldn't fly. Take all those daydreams as a kid of soaring through the air held up by the leathery wings of a huge dinosaur and toss them out the window...cause the pterodactyl's wings were used for swimming.

In fact, lets just throw dinosaurs out entirely. The bones we find were actually buried by angels to test the faith of biblcal literalists.

Now that I'm re-reading what I just wrote it's beginning to seem like a rant, so I'm gonna go back to the Triceratops now.

So, here's my problem with these wacky childhood attacking scientists, and their new position on the Triceratops...

What they're saying if I remember right is that the Triceratops is actually the Torosaurus. Supposedly, the Triceratops as we know it is just a Torosaurus in the early stages of development.

But here's the problem I have with that: even as I type Torosaurus my spell check is trying to tell me that Torosaurus isn't a word....this is cause everyone knows about the Triceratops but no one knows about the Torosaurus.

So, why do we have to lose the Triceratops? If there really is only one dinosaur being referred to twice, why are we losing the iconic dinosaur? If the Triceratops is nothing but a nascent Torosaurus, can't we just make the Torosaurus an aged Triceratops?

That compromise could have been made just as easily...only problem is no one knows what the heck a Torosaurus is so no one would care to lose it and the scientists that decided to attack our childhood wouldn't get research money for destroying a dinosaur no one cared about.

So I guess what I'm saying is this is how the conversation should go if someone wants to discuss the loss of a dinosaur:

"Did you know the Torosaurs never existed?"

"I've heard that "

"Yeah, scientists just discovered that it's just a geriatric Triceratops."

"Awesome. Never heard about a Torosaurs before, but I like the Triceratops so it must be cool too."

See? No waves. No controversy...just enlightenment.

We need to fight these scientists. They're the real ones that killed the dinosaurs.

If we don't let them get away with this nonsense we can get them out into the plains of Montana making real discoveries. They could find something like Superomegasaurus--a dinosaur that eats rocks and breathes fire. That would be a discovery that I'd be happy to read about. Yeah, do that...and leave Sarah and Littlefoot alone.

As far as I'm concerned The Land Before Time is an historical document.

Well, that's about all I feel like ranting on today.

In other news today is my dad's birthday. Happy birthday, Dad!

Also, a cool word is brobdingnagian. It means enormous and huge.

Here's a sample sentence: The Triceratops was a brobdingnagian beast.

Anyway, hope you all have a wonderful day.

Random Stuff

First off, here are two words that I've been thinking about lately...

Jehu: this words just means a crazy driver. It's the name of a crazy king and charioteer in the bible.

Pulchritude: this word is great because it sounds nothing like what it means. A girl in my ward asked me how she looked and I told her she looked "pulchritudinous." She almost cried before the dictionary saved the day.

Oh, and the word means "beautiful." Honestly, I don't see why we're so fascinated with Latin. That's an extremely ugly word and it's all Latin's fault.

In other news I haven't posted much lately because I was busy having what might be considered a nervous breakdown. Basically, I holed myself up for a while and didn't do anything (socially at least)...trying to simplify life a bit. It was sorta like Walden, but instead of going out into nature I troglodyted it up.

In other news, I'm pretty excited for the fall (my favorite season). Fall is beautiful in Provo. The trees are all yellows, oranges, and reds. and the weather is crisp. Also, hot chocolate tastes better, I I can find more flavors of eggnog at the store, and the holidays are on the horizon.

It's the perfect season.

On a side note....it bothers me that we don't capitalize seasons. We capitalize the days of the week for heaven's sake...why not the seasons?

Speaking of season names. What's everyone's opinion on "fall" and "autumn.' I think autumn is a more beautiful sounding word, but fall is more descriptive sounding word (leaves falling and all). Most other English speaking countries call the season "autumn." I guess we silly Americans wanna be special.

Oh, and I really missed the time change this year. Yesterday I woke up to my (uncorrected) alarm at 7 o'clock (really 6 o'clock) and rushed and got ready to make it to church by 8 (really 7) for a meeting.

I thought I was 4 minutes late so I just went right into the door and I walked right into the bishopric meeting that happens right before the meeting I'm supposed to go to.

So, I walked right in on the bishop having a meeting and I started my introduction by apologizing for being late. The bishop looked at the clock and said "do you know what time it is?" I said "Well, by the looks on all your faces, and by the fact that no one else is here, and since you thought to ask me that question...probably not."

He then explained that I lost an hour of sleep for no reason. It was a hard piece of information to take. My frustration at my lost sleep overpowered my embarrassment and I left the room to take a nap for an hour.

To make things worse, when the meeting finally did start up, another person walked in (this was a day for interrupted meetings). This guy was from the stake and he needed pictures of everyone with leadership callings so they could be put on the stake president's wall. The problem was that I hadn't shaved (I thought I was late after all).

When the guy came into the room the bishop looked at me and laughed and said "Well, this isn't a good day for you!"

I posed for the picture and then asked the guy if he wanted to photoshop me clean shaven. He laughed (guess he assumed I was joking). Oh well, I guess I'll just be the one scruffy face on the president's wall.

Well, I better get going. I gotta get a lot of stuff done today. Thank you for making it to the end of this disjointed and rambling post.

I hope you all enjoy Fall/Autumn (I'm capitalizing them in rebellion (and screwing up capitalization throughout the rest of this post for Consistency).

Have a wonderful day.

Blah

Hey everyone,

Sorry for being so bad about posting lately. I have been writing, I just haven't been writing here.

I was going to blog a whole lot tonight, but I got distracted by my friend Kyle's blog (The Eccentric Sage) and ended up posting a ridiculously long comment on his latest post. The topic was money. Particularly, the possibility of being corrupted by money; it's an interesting topic.

In other news I've been down a bit lately. Most of it due to memories. It was a year ago on October 1st that Garett died, and a year ago on October 10th that I attended his funeral.

October 10th last year was a bad day. I don't think I've ever been as emotionally exhausted as I was that evening.

As usual, when I'm feeling down I become detached and start thinking. So, lately I've been going on a lot of walks.

On the bright side this has helped in the life planning area.

All these walks have left me with this realization: Instructional Design seems to be the best path for me to take: I really love education, Instructional Design is very employable, and it will give me the opportunity to both write and teach.

Also, as luck would have it, BYU has one of the best programs in the country. So, if I study here I'll graduate with a PhD in 3 years in a very employable field, from a good school, and with very little debt...all good things.

I think this is a much better arrangement than going to an Ivy League law school. Not quite as prestigious, but I think overall it's a choice that will lead to greater happiness.

Besides, if I ever change my mind my LSAT will still be on file.

Anyway, that's what I've been thinking on during those long walks, that and the story I hope to someday finish.

Well, hope you all have a great day. I'm going to get some sleep.

Saints

I just want to let everyone know how awesome saints are. They're sorta like Catholic comic book heroes: they all got great stories and superpowers.

Along that comic book theme, I once met a family that had saints trading cards. The cards were really cool cause they described the cool miracles that each saint had performed (what his/her superpowers were) and what they were the patron saint of....which is often just flat out awesome.

Anyway, here is a list of some of my favorite patron saints...

AIDS: Aloysius Gonzaga, Peregrine Laziosi, Therese of Lisieux

Abortion (protection against): Catherine of Sweden

Accountants: Matthew

Advertising: Bernadine of Siena

Astronauts: Joseph of Cupertino

Butchers: Saint Adrian

Bakers: Elizabeth of Hungary

Candlestick Makers: Ambrose

Cab drivers: Fiacre (also the patron saint of STD's)

Comedians: Vitus

Drug Dealers: Saint Jesus Malverde

Gap (the clothes? I'm not sure.): Amulph

Gunners: Barbara

Hoarseness: Bernadine of Siena

Hernia Sufferers: Cathal

Hydrophobia (Rabies): Hubert

Internet: Isidore of Seville

Lawyers: Thomas More

Marriage: John Francis Regis

Marriages (unhappy): Gengulf

Occultists: Cyprian of Antioch

Possession (demonic) : Cyriacus

Toothaches: Apollonia

Unattractive people: Saint Drogo

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There are way more of course. I had no idea how many saints there are until I started investigating last night.

Oh, and here is a link so you can figure out who is the Saint for the day you were born:

http://www.catholic.org/saints/sofd.php

Okay, I think this is all I gotta say on the subject.

Hope you all have a wonderful day!

Entrance Essay

Hey everyone. So, I need to start writing entrance essays and I've been looking into what most schools want. I have found a lot of essays that tell you all sorts of things about what you shouldn't say in a personal statement. So, to get all that out of my system I just wrote a personal statement that combines most of the mistakes people make when they write a personal statement essay. I've decided to share it here:

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I’m really glad that the personal statement essay length restriction is two pages because if it was any longer I’d have to start repeating myself to fill the space. You see, I’m a pretty boring person, and I can’t really think of anything I could put in this essay that will let you know that I’m special. I know my mom thinks I’m special, and that some people who tested me when I was a kid and then put me in a room with all the students that drool and eat paste told me I was special, but other than them I don’t think I’ve made many great impressions.

However, I really want to go to your school so I’m going to try to share a bit about my life. Hopefully I’ll be able to make my life sound interesting; I figure if I can do that, you should really consider me for your creative writing program....because if this essay interests you, then I somehow took one of the most unremarkable lives ever lived and made it sound interesting, that is the real gift of a talented writer: to be able to take the simple and unremarkable and turn it on its head and show the world something completely new. But, I realize you don’t want to hear any of my opinions on writing just yet, I promise I won’t have any more of those until I’ve received a PhD and I’m allowed to have them.

Anyway, I better get started…

I was born on June 4th 1982. I didn’t talk until I was two. My parents thought that maybe I had a hearing problem. Turned out I could hear just fine, I just didn’t have anything to say. But all that changed when my family went to Pakistan. When we got there I decided that I needed to express some things, namely: “Where in the world have you taken me?” So, I went from mute to speaking in full sentences in a matter of weeks. I haven’t shut up since. I’m pretty sure that if my parents had the choice they’d go back to the fear of having a mute child if it came with my silence. I’m sort of the verbal equivalent of Pandora’s Box.

I grew up unremarkably. The first few years of my life were mostly spent being nice to others, sharing, and building with blocks. I spent hours every day trying to create new things. I would just sit and stare at the blocks and try to envision all the possibilities contained in their matching shapes. Years later I’d have similar feelings as I’d think about words as I stared at a blank page, but I’m getting ahead of myself (that right there is what I like to call “foreshadowing”).

Anyway, years passed. I played sports. I did stupid things. I fell a lot. I accepted a lot of dumb dares.

I spent my summers wasting away my time playing hockey, running through sprinklers, and getting sunburned. I was good at just about everything I did, mostly because I was extremely competitive.

As a student I wasn’t all that great at first. I remember in the first grade I would watch all the other kids color within the lines and write their names legibly, and I’d be so frustrated with all of that that I’d just look at the window and watch the cups get pushed by the wind, and then I’d watch the janitors pick up said cups (people threw a lot of cups on the ground at my school).

Eventually I decided that I wanted to be a good student so I decided to stop staring out the window and pay attention. I started focusing like crazy. I had a friend who sat next to me who was the best colorer in the class. His name was Romeo. The kid was a six year old prodigy. Looking back I think he must have been near-sighted because as he colored he would hold his face about 3 inches from the page...but he got results. I made him my role-model and I started copying him (only his mannerisms mind you, I didn’t perfect plagiarism until the second grade).

So, I started holding my face a few inches above the paper the way he did, I started holding my pencil the same way he did. I noticed that he pushed really hard so that the led would make really dark cuts into the page and I did that too.

I took following his lead very seriously. One day I noticed that one side effect of his near sightedness was that he would accidentally brush the led around with his shirt. This created a sort of cool grey halo effect around each letter. I decided I needed to have a similar effect (but I didn’t want to ruin my shirt like he did) so I would use a kleenex and push the led around after I finished each sentence. After a while I took my emulation so far that I tried to copy his really weird pigeon-toed walk (I didn’t know that being pigeon-toed was a bad thing).

Well, as you can see, even at an early age I picked an amazing mentor, and hopefully I’ll find one as equally skilled at your fine school.

Eventually my hard work paid off. I became student of the month and I was given a little badge with my schools logo on it and a coupon for a free mini pizza at Pizza Hut. That weekend I enjoyed the spoils of my success and ate a free pizza courtesy of Pizza Hut. The pizza was so pathetically small that if it was the culinary equivalent of a midget with thyroid problems, but I’d earned it so it tasted wonderful

In Jr. High I focused most of my efforts on figuring out how to be cool. In High school I figured out how to be cool. Somewhere in that search I decided that my personality’s greatest export was sarcasm. I worked on that quite a bit.

I spent most of my days reading. I would usually go through a book every day or two. It was then that I decided I wanted to be a writer.

I was really afraid when I had this realization because, although I liked writing, I also liked food, and I knew that I would struggle to have both as a writer. But, I figured that if I worked hard, went to a good school (ahem), and paid my dues I could find a way to be successful and do what I love.

After graduation I got a job working as a pharmacy tech. It was in this job that I met enough crazy people to draw characters from for the rest of my life.

When I got tired of dealing drugs I went on a mission for two years. I worked over 80 hours a week, every week. I made a lot of friends and I annoyed a lot of people. It was on my mission that I realized that I have a personality often described as “grating.” I wasn’t even on my mission for a week when someone came up to me and said “You think you’re funny, but you’re really not.” As he walked away I watched him leave. I compared him to the people I had laughing and I realized that I was doing something right.

After the mission I went to college and I rocked it. I am very smart. I graduated with academic honors and nearly every professor I had wanted to work with me on some project or another. I had a wonderful time, but eventually they told me I had to graduate. So I did and now I’m at the next step. I guess you lucky folks on the admissions board get to determine the contents of the next chapter.

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Anyway, I wrote that in about 30 minutes or so. It's what I can't turn in, but if there was a college admissions committee that would enjoy reading that I'd really like to go there.

Push-Ups

Sorry for not posting lately. For a bit of great news, that song I have been working on is now done. I play it a little rough in some parts, but overall it's finished. In a few days it should be polished and then I can let this horrible project slip from my mind. I really hate it when I set a goal for something...maybe if I was better at moderation it wouldn't be such a problem.

Anyway, today I thought I'd briefly post about something that happened last Sunday.

Last Sunday I walked in on a conversation that two of my roommates were having with a girl. Let me paint the picture for you.

The girl was what in some circles is known as a "woo girl." This is a girl that yells "woo" in excitement all the time, a girl that has "girl's night out," that runs around the town and flirts with guys while wearing jeans, a flannel shirt, and a tiny cowboy hat.

(These girls are the female equivalent of those guys who get fake tans, wear really tight pink (oh, sorry guys....salmon) colored shirts, use way too much hair product, say dude in every other sentence, and wear Axe cologne)

One thing that is know quite as well known about girls of this sort is they also like manipulating guys. I don't know if they're trying to gauge the power of their feminine wiles or if it's for pure sport, but they always put challenges to guys that test their machismo.

Well, as I walked in on this conversation somehow my two roommates were talking with this woo girl about how many push ups they could do (woo girls are really good at steering conversations into topics like this).

One roommate said he could do more push ups than the other. The other laughed and said no way. The girl giggled because she knew that two guys were working hard to impress her. As I gauged the situation I decided it would be fun to help the woo girl out. So, I told everyone a story. I told them my push up story....

The push up story happened in 2005. I had been back from my mission for a year and I was getting ready to go to BYU.

It was late at night...probably around 12 or so. My sister had a boy over. They were talking about push-ups (and no my sister wasn't a woo girl, this guy was probably just a braggart).

So, the guy was showing my sister how he could do push ups and clap his hands. That really isn't very hard and I said as much. I then said "well, what would be really hard would be to do a push up and then clap your hands behind your back."

Everyone looked at me like I was crazy. The braggart said such a thing wasn't possible. I hate hearing that something isn't possible so I decided to give it a try.

Now, when it comes to feats such as this I'm a very stupid person. Also, I'm an overconfident person. So, instead of thinking ahead and realizing that it might be intelligent to find a soft surface to try this on....I went straight to my knees on the painfully hard tile floor and prepared to execute my feat of strength.

Well, I made a pretty good effort at it. I did clap behind my hands and I got my hands in front of me...sorta. But I hit the ground with my chin at the same time I hit the ground with my hands....so the hands didn't do very much to absorb the impact.

My head felt groggy almost immediately. I shakily stood up. I reached my hand to my chin and felt blood... I knew had a trip to the emergency room ahead of me.

It's always embarrassing when you go to the emergency room after doing something stupid. They always ask you what you're there for and you gotta just bear it and explain to them how dumb you are. Well, that night, as I was filling out my paperwork, when I got to the question"What caused your accident?" I wrote an answer that I thought was true but delightfully vague: "extreme exercising."

The doctor asked what that was when he started to stitch me. When I told him he started laughing....a lot. I started to laugh too and that opened my chin up again.

Now, I don't know if the doctor was a sadist, or if he thought I just deserved this because of my stupidity, but he decided to sew me up using red thread. This is a problem because my beard has a lot of red in it.

The doctor told me I couldn't shave for at least a week, but I could get my stitches out in a few days. So, when I went to get the stitches out I had a pretty full beard in the area of the cut, and the stitches and my beard matched almost perfectly.

When the nurse was pulling out the stitches she's usually use the needle nose pliers to pull out about 3 hairs by the root for every stitch she found. It really hurt. I think this hurt more than the initial injury.

That doctor got me so good.

Oh, and on a side note. That week was the week I interviewed with the stake president about going to BYU...a school that requires careful grooming....so I went to my interview to go to BYU with a beard. The president told me "You're aware that how you look will not be appropriate when you go to BYU?" I said "yeah, I'm just not allowed to shave right now." He looked at me sideways but I really didn't feel like explaining my stupidity to him. If I did he probably would have recommended that I not go to BYU...not for moral reasons but for intellectual ones.

Anyway, after I shared this story the woo girl got it into her head to make my roommates prove themselves to her. She said, "Oh, you can do a push up and clap behind your back?"

You'd think that from my story that she'd have taken home the message that I couldn't, but I did admit that as soon as I got my stitches out I performed the feat in more controlled and softer conditions. I said I wasn't going to, she pressed, I said "not gonna do it," she pressed. I said my roommates could do it, they agreed.

So, both of them attempted the feat. One of them (the one who is in the army and does push ups every day) made it look really easy. The other one knocked all the wind out of his stomach (but he sorta pulled it off).

The girl then continued the conversation about how many push ups my roommates could do and my two roommates had a push up contest. They each did about 100 push-ups.

The entire time the girl watched like a puppet master as my roommates acted on her every whim.

It really is depressing at times to see guys behaving like this. When it comes to showing off we don't have much dignity.

It really makes me sad to watch people blatantly and whimsically manipulated. Even when they sorta deserve it.

Anyway, when we got back to the apartment my friends joked that I couldn't do it, and since the girl was no longer around, I showed them that I could.

And that's the end of the story.

I was going to write a bit about the ethics of manipulation, but I'm sorta hungry so I'm gonna stop now.

Hope you all have a great and safe day.