108 for Jake

***Pardon the delay. Midterms ended weeks ago. How embarrassing!***
This semester, my filmmaker has turned into a economic-theory-wielding scholar as well. Three mid-level economics classes means a nightmare of a midterm week in any country's currency. But he handled it with grace and fortitude. He even walked out happy, albeit hungry, from the test that took him (and most of his classmates) four and a half hours.

To celebrate, I took nearly 108 oreos, crunched some into a chocolate cake, whipped another third into a no-bake cheesecake, rolled the rest into truffles, and coated the whole sha-bang in chocolate ganache (a fine ending to any party in your mouth, I believe).

When I first saw the recipe for this cake, I thought no one should ever make it. But then I found myself searching for an event that would justify such a cake. Luckily, Super's midterm marathon was just that.

Once grades came back, we found out he definitely deserved this cake too. All A grades, including the top score in his entire class.

He documented the cake making with these photos. Credit for my genie pants goes to Jenny and her Jerusalem trip; credit for my fantastic Fictionist shirt goes to Fictionist and to James.

Want to make your own 108 oreo cake? Here it is.

Film montages are seriously happy things

I worked on this video for my class on genre film. It's loosely a screwball comedy, with references to Smoke Signals (a movie I love and highly recommend), I Love Lucy, and a few others.

Now, I am no film maker as this video shows. But I'm pretty proud of this montage and the outtakes at the end for just being happy material. I also love this song we used. It's by the Aquabats. Kara's uncle (she's pictured to the left in the stripes) is actually in the Aquabats. How's that for awesome? Enjoy.

Blurring the lines: an essay on art and science

I once worked on the BYU Honors Program magazine, Insight. This last semester, I wrote for it instead of editing. Here's my reflection essay from the most recent issue. Use the reader below to open it. Use the slider to zoom in and drag the image around to read it.

My own case of perfectionism

President Samuelson, the president of BYU, stood up and said these words:

"I am grateful to add my welcome and greeting to you at the beginning of an exciting fall semester. This is a wonderful time of year. We hope you have had a productive, if not restful, summer and a welcome change of pace to help prepare for the challenging and exciting work of the weeks ahead. You are not yet too far behind in your course work, and the prospects for this fall are bright. This has the promise of a terrific year. It will be an even better year for each of us personally if we can avoid making unnecessary or foolish personal mistakes. You may believe I am talking only about slothfulness or Honor Code violations. Equally concerning to me is the rather common problem of perfectionism."

As he said them, I was believing I was in for just that: a talk about how I should do more and be better. And I couldn't listen to that because I was already sick in bed, laid up because my worry and stress had ground down my spirit so much that my body caved to the perfectionist in me.

My heart rejoiced though as he said what he was really going to talk about was the very ill that was making me throw up: perfectionism.

It's such an attractive trap to think you need to be everything, all of the time. It's understandable that we think that way, but we mustn't.

"We may not be happy with our deficiencies, but we also should not be incapacitated by them," President Samuelson says. I know what that feels like, and I'm learning what it feels like to overcome it.

"We teach the importance of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. I believe if you look carefully at what, for example, I myself and others have said and written, you can find ample evidence that we endorse these notions. There are times, however, when these cardinal strengths can become handicapping sins. Just as a young mother or father reaches out a hand of encouragement and support for a young baby who is beginning to think about walking, so our Savior and His Father do the same for us as we begin to think about risking a quest to get on the road to eventual perfection. Remember, while we mortals may tease each other on occasion, it is not in the personality or approach of our Redeemer. That is, He never pulls back his hand when it is extended. True, you and I, like Peter walking on the Sea of Galilee, might lose faith and withdraw ourselves, but God never does and never will withdraw the hand and support offered. But, and this is really a significant qualification, because of the necessity of agency and choice, we must be the one to grasp, figuratively or literally, the extended hand."

My dear friend Kent says that we have to ask God what areas we should be improving in, rather than beating ourselves up about the millions of good things we should be doing. He always promises that when we ask that, God will tell us.

Though I've believed that for a long time, I've struggled to make that transition from trying to do everything to really listening for what Heavenly Father would have me do. For me, it comes when I stop and ponder on the lessons He's been slipping in here and there. Now that I know what He'd have me work on, everything else becomes more manageable as it falls in its proper place.

For the friend whose chemistry final didn't go so well

On Wednesday, I took the last testing center-esque (I actually took it in the JSB) multiple choice test I will ever take in my life.

Honestly, I love multiple choice tests because I love reasoning through them and being able to figure out the logic even when I don't always know the material as well as I might. It hadn't really occurred to me until now that there would be a time in my life when multiple choice tests would stop. I may never take one again. And excepting maybe the odd driving test, no one will ever evaluate me or my knowledge with a flurry of bubbles and graphite. Ever.

This was made all the more keenly true by the subject matter: marriage prep. I couldn't study more than the bare minimum because it was too overwhelming to evaluate myself on all the characteristics I need to develop to be a better disciple of Christ.

(In case you didn't know, discipleship=marriage prep. Not convinced? Well, Elder Holland says, "Believe that your faith has everything to do with your romance, because it does. You separate dating from discipleship at your peril. Or, to phrase that more positively, Jesus Christ, the Light of the World, is the only lamp by which you can successfully see the path of love and happiness for you and for your sweetheart. How should I love thee? As He does, for that way 'never faileth.'")

I filled in my answers on the scantron with the same great diligence that I have taken all of my BYU tests with. Yet every question asked me what I knew, but no one questioned me on what I believed or what I did or what I have become. I kept thinking of the humanities tests I've taken, which all seemed concerned about whether I knew it was Nietzsche who said God is dead, but never worried about whether I believed him or not.   

This test was no more a measure of me than our junior high years are of our potential as people. In some ways, it did capture my attitudes, but mostly, it tested me on what attitudes match up with vocab words.

I am learning to believe the things I learned in that class, but I am slow at becoming that disciple I would be. Semesters end and grades come out, but we change, learn, and grow on a less standardized schedule.

Though I haven't perfected the discipleship material, I am happy to say that I have learned in this class and that I've put in a significant effort into it, well beyond that I've done for other classes. Still, I want to be more.

It's comforting to know that when I've hit my ceiling, God makes up for the rest of it. It is He who truly makes me a disciple. I know this because of my other class.

In my ELANG 410 grades, there are 6 red scores. These mark the days when I hit my absolute limit and could do no more. Yet these don't even include the number of times when I turned things in weeks after they were due. Before this semester, I was telling someone I'd basically "failed" my class. Sternly, they asked me if I'd ever just not done an assignment actually in my life. It was humbling to answer, "no." I didn't really know what it was like to be able to do no more and have to just quit.

I do now. It's a hard thing, since it goes against so much of what I work for. But it's a beautiful thing sometimes too. I say beautiful because it teaches us that God really doesn't love us based on anything to do with our schooling. Our worth is not based on what the world looks at. I've heard that and said that before, but now I believe it.

There are no more multiple choice tests in my future. But the testing of my discipleship is never over.

For my dear friend with the chemistry final

HOSA Conference 2007: my closest brush with chemistry

Confession: I have never let myself take a chemistry class. In high school, I was too afraid I couldn't do well in it, so I never took one. In the past two years though, I'm been writing news stories about chemistry, and it never fails to intrigue me. I'd like to understand it better, and I hope that someday I will.

Thinking about chemistry, often reminds me of this essay by my good friend, Bess. She literally wrote the entire thing in a blue book in the testing center instead of taking her chemistry test. I don't recommend this to everyone, all of the time (meaning skipping out on the test), but I do love the beautiful nature of her experience. Though these moments of life changes are scary, they are mysteriously grand.

Please enjoy: http://inscape.byu.edu/blog/2012/03/01/chem-352-007/