Smile

I've typed this four times, and deleted it four times.

I've broken all of my rules of writing and done an entire draft of this article that I want to write, and no matter what it comes out like I'm the biggest jerk in the world.

I'm going to re-start it one last time and try to tackle this thing in the most positive light that I can.

I am so happy for my friends. All of them. From the best to the worst, to all of them in between. I'm going to be honest and finally say what we all do - there are some friends I keep around on Facebook just to pop in on when I'm having a bad day to remind me that I'm not as bad off as I think I am.

I've got debt, I've got a crazy life, and I'm juggling a million and a half things because I'm under paid but over worked. As hard as I think my life might be (my sister actually emailed me this winner of an article this afternoon http://gawker.com/the-misery-of-adjunct-professors-keeps-higher-education-1772267323 ) there are others that I keep around me just to make sure that my life isn't quite as bad as I think it is.


To those winners that I keep in my circle of friends that I never talk to, that I rarely ever see, just let it be known - the only reason I keep you around is to keep track of your train wreck of a life because it helps me get through mine.

It used to be that the train wrecks were sitting right next to me for class after class in high school. Even in college I had roommates or dorm mates that would be putting themselves in the craziest of situations that I could watch from a distance. The fishbowl of Provo was an amazing thing because it let me see the good in my life without having to look that far. Now that I'm living in a house and I honestly don't socialize that much, it's a bit harder to find my peers and how they're doing. Luckily Facebook is there for me to stalk you and to remind myself that I can smile because I'm not living a dead end life that has no hope for me, becoming that person on Facebook who only talks about getting drunk over the weekend because you can't stand your job, or just giving up. Thank you for letting me see the good and keep on smiling.

Even now it sounds really bad, but this is the best draft I've got. So, thank you for choosing to be stupid, because it helps me see the good choices.

Shoot Me First - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/131/the-kids-are-alright

Part of this episode was the fact of teachers trying to notice students that are troubled, or possibly doing something stupid like a school shooting. It's one of those things that I have the very real possibility of doing because I deal with writing, and I make my students write about their own thoughts and  opinions. I have the very real chance to see the mental health of students, and seeing just who is mentally stable and who might be walking on a thin line outside of that.

All things considering, I'm supposed to be a gate keeper of the university and recognize when, or if, a student starts to go off of the rails. The only problem with that? I am pretty loose with the crazy stuff that students throw at me. Just this semester I've had students tell me stories about LSD trips, getting arrested by the cops, Senior pranks, almost dying because of pranks from their friends, and that's just the scratch of the surface.

If looked at in the wrong light, I could have easily reported a large chunk of those students. There were down right sociopathic mentalities with students with these stories, and I had to sort through them and figure out if the student I was dealing with was mentally well adjusted.

Not only that, but I have students who mentally show that they just give up. They're going to school, they do the best they can, and then one thing triggers and then they just give up. Depending on those triggers of why they stop showing up, I'm starting to put myself in the cross hairs of students that aren't okay.

That's the scary part about teaching, hearing why other students in other schools decide to go on shooting sprees. I fail a student and I put my butt in line of a gun shot. I make students think critically and analytically - I'm in the cross hairs. I make a bad joke, be slightly offensive, or do anything that makes a student angry and instead of them getting a spine and learning how to be an adult, I run the risk of dealing with a crazy and being in the line of a gun shot.


School shootings are their own deal that I could write page about (I mean, come on people, you come in fully armed, and you only kill two people? Do the words fish in a barrel mean nothing to you? I'm sorry, but yes, deaths are horrible, but the accuracy of those people is down right horrible.) but it's a scary realization that at any point one of my students could come in and shoot me because of something I've done to them. Instead of talking to me, instead of getting help with whatever issue they're dealing with, they're reaching for a gun and my classroom is a target for them to hit.

Now, in the future, if any of my students decide to go on a school shooting and shoot up my classroom, please shoot me first. I'm going to go out on a limb, and after seeing someone get shot, I'm going to make fun of you. Mockery and insults are my coping method. If you put me in a bad spot, I'm going to hurt you . . . mentally. If you show up into y classroom and you take ten shots, but only manage to kill three people, please believe that I'm going to broadcast your hit rate to everyone. You're going to be reloading and I'm going to yell out, "It's okay everyone, even if they shoot another five times, none of us are going to get hit because they're such a bad shot!" It'll only go down hill from there. I'll broadcast your grades, why you're failing, or anything else that I can put on you. In short, shoot me first, or at least put me pretty high up on the list, because if you don't, I'm going to make the rest of your shooting spree a living hell.

Warhammer 40k Thousand Sons - My Way

 They're not 'done done' because there's a bit more edge highlights that I need to throw on there just to polish up the last few of them, and then there's the case of basing, but the unit as a whole is finally finished.

I don't want to go through each one quite yet and give a big blown up picture of each one, but here's my Thousand Sons Sorcerer. I'm not really quite sure why they all have the color blend on them, but by now, it just looks awesome, so I keep on doing it. As an important reminder - these are not a typical Thousand Sons in any way. The models are a bit off. There should be no close combat weapons on anyone but the leader, and the leader should not be rocking that staff and a sword. It's nice to see him with it, but it's not exactly kosher. I liked how it looked, therefore I made it happen. 

As always - any critique or comments about how I could become better are always appreciated.

I Have So Much Same Word - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/130/away-from-home

If there ever was a time that I was away from home, it was when I was living in Sweden, and it is a mystery to me how in the world the seven dwarfs made it there.

The thing that you have to understand first, is that there were seven of us traveling from Utah to Stockholm together, and after nine weeks with each other learning Swedish and how to teach, we realized that we were the seven dwarfs. It wasn't a name that we always went by, but the group of us totally met the seven dwarf characteristics.

Depending on who you ask, there were a few that were up to debate on which one of us were covering which dwarf, but there were seven of us, and most days we fit this pretty well. 

Elder Ragsdale - typically doc
Elder Francom - typically happy
Elder Jones - typically bashful
Elder Checketts - typically dopey
Elder Barrus - typically grumpy
Elder Hansen  - typically sleepy
Me - typically sneezy

Again, it wasn't a perfect science, but we were the seven dwarfs, and the seven of us got strapped into a plane with nothing more than a few papers in our hands telling us where we would need to transfer and which planes we needed to make.

The only problem? The one of our transfers was in Paris, and none of us knew French. We could get around in Swedish, but French, not so much, and we were stuck in the Paris air port trying to find our gate and everything to get to the place we were actually headed.

After pure luck / divine intervention, we made it to the gate when Elder Jones managed to get out to a group of Sweedes next to him, "How do you say "jet lag"?" (but he asked in Swedish). He wanted to know because he was starting to feel it. We were eight time zones away, had been on planes for a while and were only going to be on one more plane.

Their response was, "Samma ord" = same word. They were trying to tell him that the Swedish word for jet lag, was the exact same thing as it was in English. All he had to say in Swedish was that he had so much jet lag, but with a slight Swedish accent on the 'jet lag' and he'd been just fine. His brilliant mind, partially in the place where we had only learned religious Swedish, and also had a significant amount of jet lag, thought that the word for jet lag was literally same word. That meant that he went back into the conversation he was trying to have in Swedish and said, "I have so much same word."

I make fun of Jones, and it's easy to try to make him the person of jokes, that he didn't know what was going on, that he didn't get the language in use, or anything else, but it could have just as easily been me, but I was trying not to talk to anyone because I was still me.

Being a missionary is wrapped up so much into that one experience. Jones was coming from a very pure and innocent place. He just wanted to talk and be understood, but he had no clue what he was doing. The same goes with every day missionary work in Sweden. We tried as hard as we could, and we just wanted to talk to people because that's what we believed in and knew helped us, but then reality hit in and none of us knew what to do because none of us had any experience in actually adulting.

For two years I was away from home, and had I actually known what I was doing, things would have been drastically different.

Inventory

I was watching videos on the train, and ran into things like this where the guy owns a STUPID amount of points of an army. Seriously, 34,000 points? That's beyond how many points that were at the apocalypse game I played, for both tables. Given, he does cheat just a bit because he puts deamons and marines together (marines alone are 28,000 points), but still 34,000 points is a LOT of points even if he didn't paint them all (which I think is just weird, but that's just me)

That made me wonder - what's my army point value at? If I fielded everything, just how many points could I put out? No limits, unbound, what would happen?

And I didn't know that answer, so this is the post to sort that out.

Troops - 

Cultists - 16 (8 cc, 6 ranged, 1 heavy, 1 flamer, 1 lead with shot)

CSM troops - 32 (2 flamers, 2 heavy, 15 with only bolter, 12 with pistol cc, champ with plasma and powerfist)

Elites -

Chosen - 6 (bolter, bolter & mace, axe & bolter, double lightning claw, plain bolter, pistol & power fist)
Possessed - 5 (they don't have wings, I need to remember that)
Terminators - 10 (axe&bolt, reaper&sword, axe&bolt, powerfist&flamer, axe&bolt, mace&flame, mace&flame, powerfist&bolt, axe&combi, champion with powerfist&combi)
Hellbrute - regular

Thousand Sons - This one is tricky, because there's 17 regular guys, 2 with swords (that could be sorcerers if they needed to be) and 2 regular sorcerer models. I'm going to show them as I see them and take one of the sorcerers and bounce it down to HQ, which means I've got 20. 19 regular, 1 sorcerer for all of them. I'm also aware of just how little this group makes sense as they are carrying close combats, and they don't do that. Just live with me here for a second and assume that they are what I say they are because that's what they are.

Rhino - 3 (one is not yet built)

Fast Attack -

Raptors - 5 (but have possessed wings)
Warp Talons - 5
Heldrake

Heavy Support -

Maulerfiend
Predator

HQ -

Terminator (lord or sorc) - staff & bolt
Terminator (lord or sorc) - no arms yet, up to whatever. 
Crimson slaughter (lord or sorc) - sword and pistol
Sorcerer - sword&staff
Daemon Prince - wings, sword
Daemon Prince (Dragon Ogre from fantasy) - axe
Tzeentch Lord/sorc on a disk - spear

That's 103 models.

This means on the low end, nothing special, nothing fancy we have the following point total for this mob is 3,372 points (about 1/10 of what the movie showed at the top of this), and the high end (from what I'm able to tell) is something along the lines of 5,200 points.


Low end average - 32.7 pts.
High end average - 50.5 pts.

I don't even want to talk about that compared to my zombies. This is truly an 'elite' army. Not too many things on the board, but wow, can I make points just fall from the sky. The thing with this calculation is that it's been done at 3:00 in the morning after grading papers for most of my classes. It is very easily off by a few (hundred) points.

Goals

I'm about to wrap up school, and there's no class until May 4th - so time to set up goals.

By the start of classes on May 4th, I am going to -

1 - Get a draft of 4th Wall out to my editors.
2 - Finish up my 1k sons
3 - Start my Helldrake (and maybe finish it)

I just want to put those up here so I remember and so I hold myself accountable. Origionally 4th wall was going to be sent out at the start of March, but then grading hit and I didn't have time to write enough, so it didn't work out. I will get it out, and I will get it published by the end of Summer. That's the long term goal. Short term, I've got to get a draft.

Books To Read

I had a student ask me what I thought they should read, because Summer vacation is coming soon and they wanted to get some good reads in their bookshelf. The following is a quick list of some of the greats that I think everyone should read and a bit of why I think people should read it.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy; A Gentleman - By Lawrance Stern -
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1079
This is meant to be an "autobiography" but is a complete joke from the start and is just a fun read. Yes this is considered comedy, but it's a bit different than what you'd expect from comedy. It's an early novel, so it's a bit long at points, but the best part about it is that it completely deconstructs the basic story structure of beginning, middle, and end, and turns it on its head. It's a creative piece, but to read it like a writer and to be able to notice all of the amazing things that it can manage to do being the first to do it, is down right amazing.

Frakenstein - The Modern Prometheus - Mary Shelly
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm
This is just a good read, and is multi-leveled. It's different than what the media has given it credit for, and the differences change the meaning of the entire book. It addresses a lot of scientific ethics questions, but does it without saying that it's going to talk about ethics and morals. It's odd to think about it this way, but Frankenstein is totally a Romantic piece of literature. Remember that this has a sub-title as part of it. As you're reading it, try to understand how the monster or Frankenstein is the modern Prometheus.

Divine Comedy (or at least the Inferno) - Dante
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1001/1001-h/1001-h.htm
It's a tour through Hell. It's an interesting look at the eternity as well as the philosophy of religion. It's a creative take on punishment meeting the sin and how those punished fit into what they do.

There's always weird things out there, but to help out with some of the other stuff that I covered, but it's a bit lower down the list are some of the following -
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (don't do 1984, that's lame, do this one instead)
Canterbury Tales (all of them, not just Wife of Bath, Knight, and Miller's tales) - Chaucer
Parliament of Fowls- Chaucer
In Memoriam of AHH (all of it) - Lord Alfred Tennyson
ANY collection of short stories
Everything done by Billy Collins (former poet laureate of the USA)
When in doubt - Norton anthologies of literature. You can pick these up at major universities in their used books sections and they take an entire section of time and give the best of sections with introductions into what you're reading and how they fit together. Even if you don't get them used, they still are pretty cheap online, and most libraries worth mentioning SHOULD have something along the lines of anthologies of literature in them, even if they're not put together from Norton. It's the cheater's guide to literature. It's a personal goal of mine to read through ALL of the anthologies that I have in my bookshelf. They're really good, but unfortunately they take a bit of time to work through due to small text size and thin pages. If you're super lucky during the unloading time of students leaving school between spring and summer semesters, second hand gook stores as well as Deseret Industries occasionally get copies of these for really cheap. 

In short - my list of things that I think you should read is EVERYTHING. Read it all. Just keep reading. Find something that you want to read, and then read it.