Picture Perfect Memories

Scattered all around the floor. 

...Too soon? 

Test number two. Pictures for you! 

This is a Test

Well I mean, life is a test, so there's that. But I'm just testing this nifty "email the blog to make it post for you" that I can use while on my 18 month Argentine fishing trip. 

So hey! Hope this works. Guess I'll put some contact information up here while I'm at it. 

Mission email: emilyn.cannon@myldsmail.net

MTC mailing address:

Sister Emilyn Cannon
AUG12  ARG-MEN
2023 N 900 E Unit 800
Provo UT 84602

More info to come when there's more info to give. Or just whenever I feel like. 

Adios! 

Who Am I?

So there's this guy at work, right? And he looked so familiar it legitimately freaked me out. After a few weeks of puzzling and skillfully finding out his last name, I finally recognized him as a kid I knew when I was like eleven. So I re-introduced myself, and we talked for a bit about our homeschooling days together. "Oh, that was you?" he says.

And then these images of baggy khaki pants, oddly-colored striped polos, and a set of tight braids sort of war-cried out of my brain, and I forgot any reason I would have re-associated myself with someone who had seen those same images in the flesh. 

Point being, I've changed. 

And with my mission coming up here pretty soon, I've been thinking a lot about change. Because I've seen missions change people, and ever since December when I made the decision to go, I've been looking forward to those incredible changes. 

But then something weird happened. You know those minutes of grogginess when your brain slowly transitions from absent dreaming to wakeful thinking? Well I had one of those, and as I was lying there in the weird transition out of brain and into life, I thought I was in Argentina. 

Not that I actually thought I was there, but I was like, I'm going to be there. Me. With this body. This brain. These pajamas. This retainer taste in my mouth. And when I am there, it's going to be just like this. Me waking up from a dream, and being tired, and getting out of bed on to my knees, trying to stay awake through my morning prayer. I'm not going to magically be this perfect, happy Sister. And neither will my companion. 

And that's the point. God doesn't send perfect people on missions to convince the world of His gospel. He doesn't even send imperfect people on missions so he can make them perfect enough to teach his message. He sends regular people into regular places to meet regular people who are prepared to hear a simple message. So yes. There will be miracles. There will be life-changing experiences. And there will be some hard trials. There will be teaching and preaching, and there will be grocery shopping. There will be service, and there will be every-day conversations. And there will be Emilyn. Just me. Not Super Sister Cannon, just me. 

Well, me and God. Just like it's always been. And I do know that as long as I have God with me, whether in Happy Valley Utah, or Argentina Mendoza, I can be more than Emily + n. 

Remember That One Time

So basically this has been my life of late:

1) Sleep
2) Eat
3) Work
4) See below

And a special appearance from the Sophie sister: 

So I mean, there's that.

Have a good day!

Concentric Happenings

So the year has come full circle.

Well not really, cuz I started the blog in August. Let's try again.  

Center point being (circle pun), I've regained a share of college knowledge, returned home--same family, new house--and retrieved last summer's job. School was great, family is great, and a job will be great as soon as school can get me one of those fancy pieces of paper significant to the workplace world. For now, it's just me and my headset, stealing minutes off of ears across the nation for the sake of research. 

Call center. I'm back at the call center. 

Recently I've discovered something useful. For these past few weeks in which I've been homing, I've thought to myself, I should do some things. I should wake up before nine, read my scriptures every day, clean my room more than twice a month, and do some preparatory things for my forthcoming eighteen month Argentine fishing trip (see Matt 4:19). Instead I slept, procrastinated, and caught a chapter of Preach my Gospel every couple days. What a goose I am. 

Yesterday's randomly sought missionary chapter just so happened to be "How Do I Use Time Wisely?" with a special emphasis on this here blog post's topic, circles. I mean goal setting.

I've always liked the idea of setting goals, and I always have a few burrowed in my mess of mind mass, but I forget how effective it is to dig them out and acknowledge them. I'm sure it has a thing or two to do with the English major in me, but taking an idea and painting it out on a page using the representative figures we've come to call our alphabet, it works wonders. And it makes sense; things are always more official when in writing. Stories, documents, signatures.

And it's not like I've never conveyed my goals in the written word before; I have. I had a darling blue and green markered list of goals on my apartment bedroom wall down in this here Utah's South, and they all done darn been pretty well got did. Okay so I didn't exercise daily, but I'm gonna blame that on my traumatic cycling accident. (Stop laughing. I still have a pretty sick scar from that.)

So I wrote down some goals. Guess who got up this morning to actually do some things!

Yeah, yeah, who's surprised? David Tennant is, so there.

Moral of the story is, the alphabet is basically magical, and so is a summertime 6:30 AM. I'm serious. Be a morning person kids, it's the time of day.

Exclusive Inside Look of Emilyn's Writing Binder

I thought about apologizing for my virtual absence of the entirety of March.

Moving on.

I have this English professor (I have yet to find a character or actor to which he bears a likeness to, physically or otherwise. I did find one for my psychology professor, but more on that another day.) who seems to enjoy doing two things during class. 1) Monotone (this teacher calls for the non-existent verb form of the word) incredibly boring lectures filled with "I want all you students to guess what word I'm thinking of" questions, and 2) spew out delightful phrases of genius. It's a little difficult to fish out said genius from the slow ocean of monotonity (also a non-existent form of the word) with which he fills the room, which is why each one is penned so happily into my writing binder with stars and arrows. And with that, I figured I'd dedicate this blog post to his delightful genius fishes.

Ha. Genius fishes. I'm totally making that a thing. "Ooh! Did you hear that genius fish? What a whopper!" "Watch out guys, I feel a genius fish a-wrigglin'." Oh yeah. This is a thing.


"As you mature and become more professional, things don't get more complicated they become less complicated." 
I like this one. When you become better at something it's less about you doing harder things than it is about the same things becoming easier to do. For example, the multiplication table was just as hard for you in first grade as factoring polynomials was for you in high school, but because you only have the multiplication to compare to, factoring seems much easier. Sigh. I love factoring. I could Algebra forever.

"When children start doing what they don't want to do." 
This phrase is an unfinished sentence in my binder, but finishing it with different things almost interests me more. I almost didn't put it in because I wanted to keep it to myself. But I guess since it's about doing things you don't want to do...

What does happen when children start doing things they don't want to do? They mature? They succeed? They truly live? Or is it a bad thing? They stop shooting for their dreams? They lose their sense of themselves? They become boring adults? Did you notice that this paragraph is made up entirely of questions? Because it is. <----irony.

"The story doesn't say that, it creates that." 
(Note: This one has to do with writing and may not apply to all readers. I thought about apologizing for that as well.)

As simple and as helpful as the phrase "show not tell" is, it's not entirely true. A writer doesn't want to come in and tell the reader, "Emilyn is angry because there are dirty dishes in the sink," but he also doesn't want to say, "Emilyn's eyebrows tilt from a high point on the outside of her face, and slide all the way down to her nose as she stares at the dishes in the sink. Her hands produce sweat, and her nose sucks air in and out and in and out. She can't breath in through her mouth due to her clenched teeth." Instead, just let the anger happen. "Emilyn comes into her apartment. Dishes in the sink. And the dishes she washed yesterday are probably still lined up on the dishwasher racks. She walks into her room. Someone else had better do them." It's not a perfect example so you can just get over that right now, but hopefully you see the difference.

(WARNING: These excerpts are not affiliated with Emilyn's life in any way, and any similarities to it are completely coincidental. Also, this entire warning could be a lie.)

Let's see...one more...  Ooh.

"You know, I loved the world when it was just pencils. It was a neat place."
This professor is always struggling with technology. The classroom computer, his files, his flashdrive, Youtube videos, "tweeter", and anything else more complicated than his piece of chalk with which he gratefully uses often. He also gets the chalk all over his suit jacket, but he obviously prefers it to the stress Microsoft word gives him.

But this phrase reminded me of something else I heard recently at SUU's Tedx night. One of the speakers said, "My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son will fly an airplane. His son will fly a rocket. But his son, his son will ride a camel." I don't recall the exact point he made. Something about being careful to not repeat history, or maybe it was about the end of the world being near. And I almost want to say, in light of my professor's phrase, that a pencil will always be more reliable than a computer, but I don't really want to go that far. Computers are pretty darn effective. But it is true that there is something about a pencil that a computer just doesn't have. Maybe that's because I grew up with computers so a pencil world seems "so totally vintage" to me. I don't really know. Maybe it's just a personal problem. Or maybe it was the way he said the last part. I want to live in that neat pencil place.



So the moral of the story is that instead of getting angry at your dirty dishes you should send them on a camel to your great great grandson because dish-doing will be less complicated in the future.

Gesundheit!

Leaves and People

The weather this week at Cedar has been strangely pleasant. Gray clouds still occasionally accumulate overhead, but they only whine a little with a poor excuse of a rainstorm before grumpily bumbling off to allow the afternoon sun to brag of sixty-five degrees. The best part though is that except for the large, old piles still found in the shadows, the snow has all melted away. My roommate and I closeted our coats and toyed with the idea of wearing shorts.

Even my English teacher says this has been the mildest winter he's experienced in thirty-five years. He said it worriedly and grumbled something about global warming before assuring us that that April and May would surely bring an "unexpected" snow storm. Some hipster in the second row protested. "But my birthday is in May!" Well excuse me little Miss Early Spring, couldn't you let us late winter birthdays have our little moment in the sun?

I mean, although the birds have been chirping happily in the mornings, it's still not entirely spring weather. It's almost like a rerun of fall. For one thing, it was pretty windy today, which we definitely got a lot of last fall. Today's wind was just a little more than a breeze, but last semester the wind was so fierce you could hardly walk in a straight line on campus; anyone driving past must have thought we were all drunk. And there were leaves everywhere. I felt like Pocahontas gone wrong. Instead of this

It was like 

One particular day there were even leaves spread across the floor of the science building. I had arrived early and found a spot in the circle of armchairs and couches leaving, of course, a buffer cushion between me and the next guy so as to avoid human interaction. After playing around for a while on my phone, a group of students came in opening both of the building doors. The wind burst in and caused the leaves to flip and roll around the room, making a crackling noise like a bonfire in full blaze.  It really was the weirdest thing. It's one thing to find mud and leaves tracked in the hallways on a rainy day, but here we were chilling out on some furniture, and these leaves just start violently flying around us. 

And you can't just ignore something like that. All our efforts to keep to ourselves were whipped away with the magical leaf tornado, and we all kind of looked at each other like, "Are you seeing this? This isn't normal." Yeah that's right. We like, made eye contact and stuff. 

The weirdest thing though, was that some students still tried to ignore it and everyone else in the room. And it's like, um, the world just did something extremely strange and...leafy...and you're just gonna sit there like nothing's happening because, why? What is it about connecting with other people that's so scary you'll fight against the world just to be alone? I mean there's the element of "I don't want to bother you because you're alone and my presence might be annoying to you," but...I mean...whatever. People are weird. 

So, I guess that's the moral of the story. No matter how weird the world gets, people still try to be weirder.