BLOSSOMS.

I wrote this on April 15, 2014, the day the National Park Service declared the Tidal Basin’s pink cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C. at full bloom. It took me back, and it made me want to write. Can’t wait to experience a spring in D.C. again someday!

D.C. blossoms, Spring 2013

The pink popcorn tree hung low over my car as I pulled into the driveway last night. It was dark but my car lights had illuminated the clean white and pink festival above. The blossoms were finally here! I had been watching the spindly, low hanging tree outside my apartment over the previous dull-weathered weekend, wondering when the small buds would burst and reveal the small delicate puffs inside.

As I stepped out of the car I remembered what I had forgotten about blossoms: they carried the sweet, clean scent of spring. It was both refreshing and intoxicating all at once. I didn’t want to go inside my apartment. I stood right under the blossom canopy that hung low around my tall frame and just breathed in blossom. The small petals tickled my nose and face as I breathed in and out, in and out. I could have stayed there all night.

The fresh scent of these blossoms outside my apartment in Utah took me back to precisely one year earlier, to the famous cherry blossoms surrounding the Tidal Basin pool at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. 

The arrival of the blossoms in D.C. had wreaked havoc on my hay fever, and it turned out the Jefferson was more than a mile away from where I was interning in the U.S. Senate office buildings, but I didn’t care. I made every excuse to visit the blossoms during their fleeting stay- they only last about two weeks. I visited the blossoms in the morning before work, took bike rides around the Tidal Basin at night, strolled with friends there on the weekends. Just being there was renewing. 

D.C.’s blossoms are absolutely gorgeous and breathtaking. The endless pink and white puffs outlining the water of the tidal basin is an overwhelming sight; the blossoms are everywhere you looked. And so are the tourists. But you really can't help but be happy to see so many people in wonder, enjoying the beauty and the welcome spring weather together. And the scent. The sweet, clean scent enveloped you and was detectable from blocks away; up the busy crowded roads and walkways of the National Mall.

I wish I could be there to see the blossoms again in D.C., but it is lovely to experience my own little blossom festival at my small apartment in Salt Lake City with the small blooming tree outside my door. 

Today I’m just feeling grateful for spring. Thank goodness for this change in seasons. Thank goodness for beauty: for greening grass and flowering buds and blossoms. While I can agree with most when they say they don’t enjoy the cold, bitter winter, it is almost all worth it, just to see and appreciate the earth as it transitions into summer again. To see families taking walks outside, kids playing soccer at the nearby park, to be able to wander outside in the evenings. Summer is my JAM!

Nerding out: Keyboard short-cuts

I spend an average 6-7 hours a day (or MORE) with my hands on a keyboard. And, I’m pleased to announce that with a little inspiration and research (and a little nerdy-ness), keyboard shortcuts are changing my life.

photo courtesy independent-trainers.com

On my first day at my current job, I watched as my more mature and incredibly savvy and professional co-worker edited a document I had drafted. She was a keyboard NINJA! She had mastered all these short-cuts to delete words and sentences with one fell swoop and to capitalize or italicize with just a few punches at the keyboard. I knew right then that I was missing out on a world of information.

So I started with a simple keyboard shortcut Google search, took notes on a sticky, and am slowly mastering what I’ve learned. There are about a BILLION keyboard shortcuts out there, so I’ve just started with a few, but once I learn them the sticky goes in the trash and I learn a few more!

Here are my recent favorites:

1. CTRL + ARROW (left or right) allows you to skip through a sentence word by word instead of character by character. CTRL + SHIFT + ARROW does the same thing, but highlights the selection as you go. Brilliant.

2. SHIFT + F3 capitalizes the first letters of a selection (this seems to work in Word, but not Google docs- too bad). Press F3 again and every character is capitalized. Press it again (are you getting it yet?) and you’re back to all lower case. Handy stuff.

3. CTRL + DELETE deletes one word to the right of your cursor (a whole word! imagine!). CTRL + BACKSPACE deletes on word to the left.

4. CTRL + SHIFT + </> = font size decrease/increase

5. CTRL + i italicizes a highlighted portion of text. CTRL + B bolds a highlighted portion of text. CTRL + U underlines a highlighted portion of text. I’ve known this one for a while (I think many people do) and it is incredibly useful.

6. F5 refreshes a web browser (way easier than finding the tiny refresh arrow with your mouse)

7. ALT + TAB allows you to cycle through open programs, while CTRL + TAB cycles through web browers. I haven’t got that into this one yet, but I think it would also be helpful.

8. In Excel, pressing F2 while a cell is highlighted takes you to the end of the text within the cell. Explore it. This is PHENOMENAL.

8. Okay, okay, I left my favorite for last. ALT + D highlights the address bar of a web browser, so you can just quickly type (versus click, highlight and type) your next desired web address. COOL, right!?

Alrighty, this keyboard nerd is OUT. Do you know of any I missed?

The human capacity to love.

It was Sunday night in D.C. in early spring. Reality was settling in that the work week would start afresh in the morning, and a debate was going on in my head of whether I should go to bed early (should do) or soak up the last remaining hours of the weekend reading or catching up with friends (what I really wanted to do).

But what I did instead was stay up well past 2 am, learning a lesson I have since thought back to many times. The experience helped me realize the capacity we have to love as humans is a beautiful thing, and is certainly one of our most defining characteristics.Talk about unexpected! And formative and wonderful.

My roommates at the time were a smattering of characters. We were very different. We were each pretty darn independent, and while for the most part we got along, I never became very close to them. In many ways we only knew each other on artificial, insincere level. A “How was work?” “What are your plans after your internship?” “What are you doing this weekend?” type of friendship.

But this particular Sunday night, I learned for the first time that an aunt of one of my roommate’s had recently been diagnosed with cancer. I felt guilty when I heard that my roommate had silently dealt with the worry and fear of her aunt’s condition for weeks. Her aunt’s condition had unexpectedly worsened that particular weekend, and had been rushed to the hospital and admitted to the intensive care unit at home in Utah.

Stuck on the other side of the country, my roommate was completely distraught that Sunday night and nearly beside herself. She was disconnected from her tight-knit family and the small- town community where she had grown up, desperately wanting to know how her aunt was doing.

As each of us roommates learned what was happening, we slowly gathered in the living area, awkwardly surrounding our roommate - a girl I felt I didn't really even know- in an attempt to be a comfort and support. While she waited for a text or a call- any kind of update on her aunt’s condition- we just listened as she described the cancer as well as her relationship with her aunt: that she had been like a second mother to her growing up, that she had been supportive of her school and sports, and that she couldn’t bear the idea of losing her.

After a few tense minutes of waiting, a phone call came. Her sister, I think, calling with an update. And it was clear instantly what the message was. Her aunt had just passed away. In this critical moment, it was like the dam or wall that was holding my roommate’s composure and trust that it would all work out just broke. She wailed and sobbed and pulled herself into a ball, and her face went into her hands. 

While it was incomparable to what she was feeling, for a moment I felt an ounce of the agony and grief she was experiencing. I felt so bad, and I just watched in sincere pity as my roommate, literally reeling in pain from the news, cried and cried and tried to cope and grasp that her loved one had finished her journey on earth.

But strangely, my feeling of pity and sadness was very brief, and what I felt next was surprising and almost seemed inappropriate. What I felt was awe and a strange kind of gratitude that I had never felt before. It was like I was lifted out of that terrible scene in that nasty internship apartment in Arlington, Virginia, and I was taught this unforgettable lesson:

It is a beautiful, wonderful thing that human beings are capable of having so much love for another person to experience such intense emotions when they are gone.

That powerful moment, us surrounding her trying to sympathize, me feeling this gratitude and awe, only lasted a few minutes. Once she had gained composure, she spent some time alone and then booked a flight home that night. We spent a few hours packing up her room, and she was gone before any of us even woke up the next morning. And I haven’t seen her since.

I will always be grateful for that Sunday night in D.C. to have witnessed such poignant and pure human emotion. I am sorry that it was at the expense of another person’s grief, but it offered a window into humanity and was an exhibition of the divine characteristics humans possess to love, cherish and grieve for their fellow human beings. It’s an experience I will always remember.

Becoming.

About a year ago I entered “official adulthood”.

“Corporate America”.

The world of “nine-to-five”.

Whatever you want to call it.

Turns out, it totally womps.

Okay, okay. So that’s a bit of an exaggeration for drama and effect, but it’s hard to believe that THIS is what I was aspiring to for all those years: early mornings, business casual, traffic, perfecting my blank and empty “computer stare”, and long, quiet afternoons (the 3 o’clock hour seems to drag on for waaay more than 60 minutes).

Throw in the occasional meeting and unruly caller, some more traffic, a usually uneventful and sometimes lonely evening, off to bed early, and then BAM. All of a sudden the alarm is going off again and it’s a “here we go again…” kind of moment. You know the drill. You live it every day too.

So I can’t help but think, one year and now many paychecks (okay, so that part of a full-time job ain’t half bad...) into “real adulthood” and potentially the rest of my life…

Is THIS what life is all about??

For how long?!

How do I get out??!

Now. Contrary to what the previous paragraphs may suggest, I do not actually intend this blog to be an outlet for frustration or a place for me to vent and complain. I truly am grateful to have a job and that paycheck and a college degree in hand. And, I think, at some point, my job will also provide me with a healthy amount of satisfaction and opportunities to learn.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the purpose of the blog. What I do hope is that this blog will become a way for me to express the concerns and questions and hopefully propose solutions to the apprehensions and plain old “blah” feelings that seem to be a common thread among people in a situation similar to myself (recent college grad. mormon. single. but a really good person!! <aggravated>). And those questions and apprehensions are:

Where do we find JOY and SATISFACTION in life?

What is HAPPINESS?

How do we discover what we LOVE?

How do we PROGRESS and LEARN?

What kind of PURPOSE should we be striving to fulfill right now?

What DEFINES us?

What and who are we BECOMING?

Tack on “while still unmarried and therefore drifting, lost and in what most people call a perpetual ‘waiting game’ to be truly happy and fulfilled” to the end of each of those questions, and I think we’ve really nailed the head on the major concerns of my demographic.

No, this isn’t a dating blog. Neither is it “let’s commiserate together on being a single Mormon in his/her mid-to-late twenties or even thirties”.

Rather, I hope that this blog will focus on discovering how to become, progress, learn and love in this stage and in any and all stages of life. Yes, indeed.