Editorials

I still remember my heart dropping to my toes as my parents broke the news.

Let me preface this column by saying that I'm not married, nor have I ever been. I'm hoping that will change at some point, but not anytime too soon (a returned missionary NOT on a manic wife hunt from the moment he takes the tag off? Crazy!).

While students in my high school creative writing class read their answers for the word association exercise we had just done, I looked at my own list and realized my words were nothing like what anyone else had written. When my teacher said 'green,' most people wrote things like grass, leaf and grape. My list had words like salad, spray paint, brillo pad, and Tuesday -- and I got some strange looks.

Opinion: Lessons from losing

I can picture it now — the home where you were raised from the time your parents brought you home from the hospital, little pencil marks on door frames that measured your growth over the years. Best friends that live across the street that have been with you from preschool until high school graduation.

You have heard it a million times.

Going through a faith crisis felt, in a way, pretty similar to having a pebble inside my shoe.

“When you know, you know!” That’s something we hear all the time in Provo, even though none of us really know what we’re doing in life, especially when it comes to love.

The phone rang. A woman picked up the phone as she prayed with eagerness it was the call she had been waiting for. Nine months of waiting to be exact.

Belonging to two racial groups might give you the idea that I must feel a connection to both. I should feel like I belong more, right? I belong to two groups, not just one.

It's true. No one cares about my opinion.

It was my second-to-last class of the day, and I was ready to be done with lectures, go back to my dorm, put on sweats and get going on the homework I had been putting off. The lecture ended, and as I stood up I began to panic: I was unprepared for Aunt Flo's early arrival. I put my jacket around my waist and raced to the nearest bathroom. I made it but soon realized the only feminine hygiene dispenser was located in the handicap stall, which was occupied.

I have always had a hard time setting boundaries and telling people 'No.'

Picture this: The year is 2009. I just turned 10 years old, and I also just purchased a T-shirt with my favorite band on it. This band, of course, is the Jonas Brothers. The iconic Disney Channel boy band who I had been obsessed with for several years by this point.

I feel like I’ve lived this situation multiple times. I’m sitting in a generic restaurant, sipping water to mask my jitters, as I’m staring down a guy I’ll probably never talk to again after tonight. It’s not bad or good in any way — it’s just one of those mediocre dates that gets thrown onto the heap of dirty mental laundry that’ll get washed out of my memory in a few weeks’ time. When I collapse onto my bed at the end of the night from the exhaustion of social propriety, I get a follow-up text from the friend who set up the whole affair and just feel baffled they’re unaware enough of my tastes to think that would have ever worked out.

The BYU campus and Disneyland are a lot more similar than you might think.

For a brief period of time in middle school, I stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance. When my peers rose to their feet to repeat the same pledge we had been reciting together since elementary school, I balked.