If IKEA made cars...

When I was a little kid, the only thing I knew about Sweden was that they made little gummy fish and meatballs. And for the longest time I thought the only market for Swedish fish was the small eastern Idaho town of Malad. Whenever we would visit my Grandma there, we would do three things: fish at Crowthers Reservoir, eat some good bacon, and purge ourselves on Swedish fish. I never saw the candy anywhere else, so I figured they had a special market with old folks (I think the mean age in Malad is about 70). Well, I guess the GDP from Swedish fish and meatballs wasn’t good enough, because they moved into the furniture market—and the world is a better place for it.

Who knew the Swedes had so much engineering skill hiding behind those tight blonde braids and blue eyes. Their furniture is incredible! IKEA makes my life heavenly with tiny chairs, sleek designs, and space-saving, ready-to-assemble furniture. A trip to IKEA routinely sets me back about 150 bones, but I never have buyer’s remorse. Where else can you get an 8 dollar side table and feel like a king of modern interior design? I think they should get into other markets. Like the auto industry, for example.

If IKEA made cars, they would be cheap, efficient, and cute as a button! I’m sure an IKEA car would have a hideaway stove, room for 12 people, a separate bedroom, and still be the size of a Honda Civic, all at the price of a scooter. While we are admiring them so much, why don’t we just let the Swedes rule the world? Oh yeah, they did once and people hated them and their pointy, horned helmets. But I don’t think they would rape, pillage, and burn as much now as they did back then. They would just make cute tables for everyone, and maybe make Dancing Queen the world anthem.

A Day in the Life

When I tell people that I'm majoring in Chemical Engineering it usually elicits a response of, “oh wow” or, “so you must be smart”. Of course, it’s a little bit harder than the average major, but the coursework is nothing compared to how difficult it is to work with my classmates. I am going to explain my typical day as a student in the supposed “hardest major” at BYU.

               
 I start my mornings at 6:00 AM with a trip to the gym to get ripped, seems to be working out quite well, if you don’t believe me, ask me to take my shirt off, I will gladly do it, and you will never want me to put it back on. Actually that is all a lie, I try to work out at 6:00, but usually I put snooze on until 7:45 and either go late to my 8:00 AM class or just don’t go. It’s ok because it is just Chemical Engineering and Society. I already know all the stuff they teach me and I am probably the most liberal eco freak of all my crazy right wing, gun totin’ classmates (we talk about the environment a lot in that class, so their viewpoints come out). Then I get a two hour break where I do my homework and study while I watch the Price Is Right. I am sorry, but I think Drew Carrey is actually doing a bang up job.

               
Anywho, then I go back up to the Clyde Building for some Materials Science. I don’t mind that class because half of them are seniors and they seem to be a little more in touch with reality than my fellow juniors. Here is brief description of the stereotypical juniors in my classes.

Number 1

1. The girl who thinks out loud, shouting every answer to the professor because she knows she is smarter than everyone else.

               
2. The girl who only wears pink and blue that is only in the major to find a boy who is going to be rich someday, chemical engineers typically earn lots of money.

               

Number 3

3. The chunky kid with his butt crack hanging out who is always a half a step behind in the conversation.

               
4. The guy who thinks he is cool by blurting out the most complex mumbo jumbo to solve the simplest problem.

               
5. All the people who think number 4 is really cool.

               
This is my life.

I begin dealing with these people at 2:00 PM in Physical Chemistry. The first day of class, my professor said that P-Chem was the study of everything—so far he is right. I pretty much know a little bit about a ton of stuff. I won’t bother telling you because you won’t understand it, but no worries, I don’t either. My classmates seem to already know everything about everything, or at least you’d think that by the way they talk. I am surprised the professor can even teach with everyone and their dog finishing his sentences.

               
Then my day culminates with Fluids Mechanics, which is full of juniors:  internship hungry, blood thirsty, top-of-their-high-school-class, young engineers vying for top position. They go to the library every day, read 5 days ahead, do every homework problem 1,000 times and brag about how awesome their major is. They all seem to think that chemical engineering is the cat’s pajamas and that no one in another major can think on the same level as the dullest Chem E major.

                 
Spoiler alert— ALL THE OTHER MAJORS HAVE INTELLIGENT PEOPLE TOO—I seriously overhear them bad mouth English, History, and Art majors because they are lesser degrees. I wish there was some way to open their minds and shove something other than an equation in there, maybe a novel? It is frustrating, but I feel like I have an advantage over them because I actually know who Herman Melville, Monet, and Louis XIV were. I like to write, and believe it or not, I can carry on a conversation that doesn’t involve the intricacies of the Schrodinger Equation.

               
I hope I can survive the next two years…

On a Slightly Serious Note

I like to fish. Whether it’s threading a worm down a sharp, barbed hook or tying a tiny knot to a rooster tail, I like it. Diana and I went to Blue Lake in the La Sal National Forest this week to do a little angling. After inching down rocky forest service roads, we found ourselves at a small, clear lake brimming with hungry trout. They were jumping like crazy, ignorant that a couple of their friends would be my dinner.  I tied my line and tried a few lures, but they weren’t biting on anything, so I thought I would try something new, a marabou jig. I hadn’t ever used one, but I knew I had to make it dance up and down, so I thought I would give it a shot. I put out my line, started bobbing the lure about once a second and BAM! A bite! Ten minutes later I had two fish in my hot little hands—dinner.

Blue Lake

I am not a hunter, not even a good fisherman, so killing things is a little tough for me. Usually I just let the fish suffocate on the ground or knock them out, but we needed to eat them soon, so I had to kill them quickly. I used a technique that involved stabbing them in the “iky spot”, which is behind the eye, leading to the brain.  I took out my long fishing knife, got ready, but then had something of an epiphany. I felt bad killing another animal. I know it’s ok, God put animals on the earth for us to eat, but I was the one taking its life, I was in charge of this creature’s fate. It felt like the moment needed to be reverenced, that the fish deserved respect. Fish don’t feel pain like we do, their existence has little to no pleasures, and they live to be eaten, either by us or another animal, but I still felt like I should give my respect to it and nature. This led me to ponder other religions’ beliefs on animal slaughter.

Jewish dietary laws, or kashrut, state that animals need to be slaughtered in a certain way, by a pious person known as a shochet. The shochet is a person of Jewish faith, good character, and is often the rabbi in smaller communities. The knife used must be razor sharp and the animal must be bled first with a single clean slit to the throat, causing unconsciousness quickly and killing it humanely. These and other regulations make the meat kosher.

While not one of the five pillars of Islam, halal is the Islamic code of health similar to the kashrut. The halal method of slaughtering is called dhahiba and is the same as the Jewish form of slaughter; the only difference is that a prayer to Allah needs to be said at the time of killing. The method is controversial; many animal rights activists say that it isn’t as painless as they say. Studies have been done, but a clear consensus hasn’t been reached.  

It’s a little ironic that I thought of this as I was killing a fish because in both kashrut and halal laws, fish are excluded. Although I ended up killing the fish and eating them, I tried to do so respectfully and reverently. Even though there is a lot of controversy surrounding the Jewish and Islamic methods of slaughter, I commend them for their traditions and reverence towards nature.

To Save or Not to Save?

Thanks Mom and Dad!

I was driving around the other day and my attention was drawn to the little sticker in the upper left hand corner of my windshield. You know, the yellowish sun stained sticker that one that no one pays attention to until your car is 3,000 miles overdue for an oil change. So since we are going on a couple trips this week and both the mileage and the date on the sticker were embarrassingly far-gone, I figured I should get my oil changed. As a poor, starving, impoverished college student I thought I would save a couple bucks by doing it myself, so I did a little research on how to do it and how much money I would save. The following is a list of products I would need and conservative prices:

1 Oil Filter: $5.00

4 Quarts of Oil: $16.00 (at $4.00 per bottle)

Crappy Pan: $1.00 at DI

Finding a Way to Dispose of Old Oil: Sucky

Probably an Oil Filter Wrench: $10.00 on Amazon

So the total comes to a conservative $32.00. Of course I could reuse the oil filter wrench, so eventually it would pay for itself, the pan too, so let's say around $25.00. Jiffy Lube offers the service for around $30.00, and then I can get a $7.00 discount for being a student, so $23.00 total.

Let’s recap, this is what would happen if I did it myself: I would get dirty, I would have to get parts, and I would be saving negative $2.00, sounds pretty undesirable. Then I said to myself, “Wait a minute Jordan, don’t you want to have a more intimate relationship with your vehicle? Dont you want to know what's being put into your wonderful Honda CRV? And aren’t you tired of telling them you’ll wait until next time to change the gross air filter?” But then I reasoned with myself by saying, “I have a great relationship with my wife, but when she has a problem under the hood, I send her to the gynecologist, I don’t look it up on youtube and learn how to fix it. Why is the car any different?” That seemed to shut myself up because I received no rebuttal, which means I am going to Jiffy Lube.

Marriage, Bellies, and Babies

This picture makes me feel awkward.

I have discovered that there are four types of students at BYU: single, married, pregnant married, and married with children. They all have distinct views on life, school, and the other groups. I fall into the second, and happiest group—married. We have all the benefits of cheaper housing (just barely), government grants, sex, and we don’t have a child so we can do whatever we want whenever we want. So when someone gets married, they are banished from the sect of single people and forever become the weird married friend. And every time the single friends do see you all they can think about is the fact that you are married. You get the question, “So… how’s married life?” and you know what they’re really asking: "How's that forbidden fruit?" One of these times I’m just going to call them out on it and say that it’s great, but kind of messy and more work than you’d think.

Married people get along well with married people with children. It quells the baby hunger to play with a baby that isn’t yours. It’s always been my favorite thing to make faces at babies behind peoples’ backs in church. I love the myriad of reactions I get. There’s the happy, trusting baby who smiles and hides in their mom’s shoulder, then there’s the intellectual baby who just stares, unimpressed. I feel like those ones are studying me, saying in their head, “What a blooming fool, does he think I like to be patronized?” And then there’s the horrified baby who thinks I’m going to eat him. That’s when I pretend I’m asleep so the parents don’t turn around and see that I am the reason their baby hates church.

Pregnant married people are much stranger than married with children people. I don’t think they realize that people who aren’t familiar with the female gestation period have no idea what “33 weeks along” really means. I know that it takes about 9 months for a human to make a baby, and 2 years if you are an elephant, but I don’t want to divide the weeks by 4. When my wife gets pregnant, I am sure I will understand the nuances of the different stages and in what week certain junk happens, but right now, I have no idea. We don’t measure things in tiny quantities in other facets of life, why in pregnancy? When people ask me how much longer I will be in school, I say a little less than 2 years, not 98 weeks, or a little under 60 million seconds.

Well since this is my first post. I will make it interactive. You should leave a comment about your favorite interaction with somebody who belongs to a different one of these groups that was really awkward or foreign to you. My buddy Trevor came over to give me something one morning and while he was there Diana came out of the bedroom and said hi to us. Trevor and I have known each other forever, but I think it was hammered home that morning that I was married now, because he looked extremely uncomfortable. We just laughed about it. Well I will try to post something once every 168 hours, so be prepared for some awesomeness.