I was accepted into BYU’s BFA program, which means I can get a more specific degree in painting.  I feel like such an upper classman now.  I am completely immersed into my art major.

I love telling people that I’m an art major.  Their reaction is always the same.  “Oh, that’s fun.”  Fun.  Being an art major, they perceive, is fun.  While I can’t lie, I enjoy art and it is fun, I get kinda bothered by the fact that people associate the major with “fun” and not “work.”  For example, I just handed in my lithography final.  I finished the edition at 4 in the morning in the hfac amidst toxic gasses.  The project took me 37 hours.  37 freaking hours.  And it cost me $100.  That makes near $300 that I have spent for the half semester class.  That’s a lot of money, and that’s a lot of work (keep in mind the final is not the only project for the class).  The best part is, that the class is worth 1.5 credits.  1.5 credits.

When was the last time you, as a non art major, spent 37 hours studying for a final for a 1.5 credit class?  And you know it takes a lot more than 1.5 credits to graduate.  My BFA degree is going to cost me so many precious hours, dollars, and probably years of my life considering the toxic stuff I work with.  It’s insane.  It would be so much easier to get a BS degree.

So the next time someone asks me what my major is, and I tell them what I’m studying, and they say, “Oh, that sounds like a fun major!”, my response will be, “Actually, it’s a very expense, difficult, labor intensive major.  If it wasn’t so gosh darn fulfilling, and if I wasn’t so gosh darn amazing at it, I might do something else.

I have a cold.

It makes it so hard to eat. I can’t breath through my mouth because I
am chewing, and you can’t open your mouth when you chew. Even if I did,
I would likely inhaled crumbs of food into my lungs, which would burn.
But I can’t breath through my nose either, because it is stuffed up.
What ensues then is a big inhale right before I take a bite. Then I
hold my breath while I chew, which is an interesting sensation. If I’ve
taken too big of a bite, then I end up chewing longer, and I start
running out of air. That gives me this frantic gasp when I’m done
chewing, and so I try to chew really fast. The whole process is really
quite funny. I sound like a starving kid scarfing between gasps of air.
Hppp. Bhaaaa. Hppp. Bhaaa.

I don’t like eating with a cold.

  I am so glad I was taught that the soul of man existed before birth and
will continue after death.  To me, that is a significant belief that
provides hope, accountability, self worth, and a desire to seek greater
things.  Knowing that you existed before you were born gives meaning to this life.  There must be a purpose to this earthly existence if your soul is bigger than this mortal span.  Why else would we come here?  Latter-day Saints acknowledge individual purposes to existence, as well as collective purpose.  We are to be tested, to see if we will seek God and follow His will.  For me, this illustrates why there is such a need for religion and spirituality.  It is because we do seek God and His will.  We have a longing to know Him based in the instincts and residual recollections of a pre-birth, eternal existence.  Knowing that we existed before we were born also elevates the status of man, giving him importance and significance.  While the teaching is not unique to Mormonism, the Church is
certainly one of the few Christian sects to emphasize and teach the
idea of a pre-mortal existence.

Knowing that we will continue to exist after we die also makes this time in mortality significant.  It makes us feel accountable because it makes us concerned about what our state will be like in the next life.  It also gives us hope that death is not the end and that we can be reunited with those who have already passed on.  A belief in the continuation of the soul is perhaps the most fundamental longing of all people in all cultures and across all religions.

Teachings pertaining to post-mortal life are more specific than on pre-mortal life.  I am grateful for the LDS notion of the spirit world.  This teaching indicates that there is a space of time between death and resurrection.  When we die, our spirits continue on with the same knowledge and experience and memory as when we died.  We have the opportunity to continue to interact with others (other spirits), and to grow and develop.  Our happiness in that state will depend on what did when we were alive–how comfortable we are with ourselves.  Those who know they did wrong or who don’t know what is going on will be fearful.  Those who know they did right will be assured of their future.  I like this idea.

Oh my goodness, I had so much fun last night.

I went up to Salt Lake City with Laura German and Sharla Carlson from my mission to go to an informal mission reunion.  It was really good to talk with them, and I felt very comfortable with them.  Sister German and I are tight–we have an understanding.  When we got the restaurant, I’ll confess to feeling really weird.  I didn’t expect it at all.  I felt . . . ok, when I started my mission, I was very afraid of rejection.  After a few months I had overcome it and was feeling very confident.  I had become a person that was well liked by the missionaries, and I was successful, so I wasn’t rejected.  Since I have come home, though, I have changed so much and have become more authentic, and therefore more vulnerable.  So when I walked in to the restaurant and saw all of these former missionaries who know me as Elder Embree, I was  suddenly filled with that fear of rejection all over again.  I felt like they didn’t know me at all, and this time rejection would be of the real me, not the version of myself I had created for the mission.  I am grateful for Laura and Drew Dayton, who do know the real me and still embrace me with fervor.  Without them, the reunion would have been very unfun.  Instead, I had a great time.

After the reunion I met up with some friends elsewhere in Salt Lake City, and we had a General Conference party that was so much fun.  So much fun.  So much fun.  More fun than I’ve had in a very long time.

You must go and see The Great Debaters.  I just saw it at the dollar theater, and it really moved me.  I don’t even know what to say about it.  You just have to go and see it.

You know, things like that make me so . . . activisty.  It just makes me want to go and advocate my cause.  To stand up for what I know to be right.  Sometimes I wish I had the guts to match this zeal despite logic and reason.