Home Sweet Watertown

Right after Christmas, I moved into a new house with three guys from my ward: Jake Wheeler, Matt Blakely, and Curtis Cannon. They're my heroes.

It's a good place. We have DirecTV, a very large television, a grill, a guest room, an office, and so on.

I'm looking to sublet my spot for the summer (maybe forever), so I took pictures of the place. So, just so I have a little bit of a record of the last few months of my life, here they are, in no particular order.

The view from my bed. 

My freaking sweet guitar rug.

Desk and art. 

I don't know why I took a picture of my closet. 

The adorable bathroom I share with my little Curtis. 

Kitchen. 

 Biggest backyard in the greater Boston area. That hammock = my life.

 More kitchen.

 Dining/Front rooms.

 Again.



Le Couch.

The World Is Too Much With Me

I always wondered when the doors were going to start shutting.

Although it is hard for me to do so, I'm going to admit to being discouraged lately. Discouraged and lost. World must have read the title of my blog, realized that Calvin has been kicking its butt, and fought back. When I sat down to write it out, the first line of a famous sonnet written by Wordsworth (a poet whose work, as a whole, I hate). Here's the sonnet:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Wordsworth is kicking against the industrial revolution, and it's not hard to tell that he's pretty bummed out with his world. I think I'm mostly just kicking against the crap hole that is America's economy as of late (thanks for nothing, Obama) and the fact that rejection wears many masks as of late. 

I have a part-time job working as a translator for a medical company called QuantiaMD. It is my personal version of Hell (see also: cubicle), and they feed the flames by limiting my hours and employing me as a contract worker so they don't have to give me benefits and can fire me without a second thought. I have another glamourous job working retail for Eastern Mountain Sports. I love the people I work with, but EMS pays a wopping $1.50 over minimum wage (good thing I have two degrees) so even if I worked there full time I would have to forego one of the following every month: making rent, appeasing the debt gods with a slough of minimum payments, buying groceries, and paying tithing (which, for the record, has never and will never be foregone). 

My car's timing belt has started a constant screaming and the clutch is iffy coming out of first gear.

I got rejected by 12 PhD programs after an application process that broke my brain and my bank account (I knew I should have used that $1400 to buy a motorcycle).

I don't have enough teaching experience to be a strong candidate for any of the three whole teaching jobs open in America right now, and I don't even get responses about applications I send for lower-than-dirt online adjunct teaching positions at world-class academic power houses like BYU-freaking-Idaho.

Don't even get me started about dating.

My confidence, my patience, and my options are all running on empty, and the effects are spreading. Here are the two ways I gauge my difficulties: I don't sleep well, basketball has ceased to be enjoyable. BASKETBALL! I can't believe it.

I'm about ready to join the army and be done with it.

^ most likely future

Anyway, there's more to complain about, but I'm tired of feeling like this. It's not like me to get discouraged and hopefully it doesn't last, but I'm tired of knocking on doors that don't open and getting no direction on which door I should knock next. 

The future is foggy to say the least. I just hope it doesn't take too long to get my bearings. 

Mr. Calvin Goes to Washington

When I first got home from Europe (shoot, that's six months ago now), I applied for a job with the Foreign Service. There is/was a Consular Adjudicator position open in Brazil. The first leg of the application was six essays and an autobiographical statement. I passed that, and so I had a phone interview in Portuguese. I passed that, so they invited me to come to Washington, D.C. for two tests and an interview.

I can't tell you much (they swore me to secrecy), but I can tell you that I owned the interview. My final score, however, was .25 points below the cut-off, so I didn't make it onto the final list. Not gonna lie, it was a lot of fun to be walking around DC in a suit and getting clearance to enter government buildings. I kinda felt like James Bond.

So, I didn't get the job, but I stayed for the whole weekend and got to do quite a bit.

Took this on my way to the interview.

Obelisk.

The Washington Monument was closed.

It's cracked from the earthquake (which I felt in Boston).

Yes.

I could spend years at this monument and never get sick of it.

I went to check out the Washington, D.C. temple.

It's awesome.

Even the door decorations are awesome.

I got to see Sister Jones (the artist formerly known as Tiff).

She hasn't changed a bit.

I went to the National Gallery of Art.

I had been to Scotland's, England's, and France's National Galleries.

I guess it was time to go to ours.

This and the next few pics are from Thomas Cole's series called "The Voyage of Life".

"Birth" is above.

"Youth"

"Manhood"

"Old Age"

"Take Your Choice" by John Frederick Peto

"Right and Left" by Winslow Homer.

I love the way the hunter changes the perspective of the title.

Phenomenal.

I took random pictures of the Mall.

The one and only Brad Meehan.

He put me up.

He entertained me.

He introduced me to beautiful women.

He is the coolest person alive.

We showed modern art what we think of it.

We took pictures in front of cannons.

It's a tradition I'm not going to explain here.

Brad's not as in to art as he'd like to be, so we I suggested the National Gallery of Art.

"Houses of Parliament" by Monet.

"The Dead Toreador" by Manet.

"The Northern Whale Fishery: The 'Swan' and 'Isabella'" by John Ward of Hull.

"Daniel in the Lions Den" by my boy Peter Paul Rubens.

I love the immensity of his paintings.

That is a mean kitty.

Brad and I walked around the Capitol.

It's pretty.

Great place for some man talk.

If only my camera could capture sunsets like I want it to.

Gorgeous.

I have always loved Washington, D.C., and this trip did nothing but remind me of that fact.

I left with no job and seven poems.

Totally worth it.

New Glasses - Help Me Pick

After smashing my glasses for the umpteenth time in a snowball fight last weekend, I've decided it's high time I get new ones. These aren't the only ones I'll look at, but I found a website that will send me five frames to try out for five days (thank you warbyparker.com).

If you know me well you'll already know which ones I like the most, but I'm not sold on anything quite yet. Tell me what you think. Comments here, facebook, texts, vibes, whatever. Ready, go.

Japhy

Larkin

Nedwin

Thompson

Roosevelt

Still in Love with Boston.

Here's what I've been doing in Boston over the last few months. It's not a comprehensive list, but it's time to put up some more pictures.

Reed, Al, Mel, and I went to the 2011 Red Bull Cliff Diving Championship.

They jumped off the Institute of Contemporary Art.

(The professional divers. Not Reed, Al, and/or Mel.)

No, seriously, they jumped off the Institute of Contemporary Art.

I want to do it.

I was inspired.

I went camping.

Danielle and I dressed up as Calvin and Hobbes for Halloween.

I helped people move. So did Nishan, Austin, and Michael.

I've noticed that I'm the only one working in these pictures.

I grew a mustache.

McCall grew one, too, but she shaved for this picture.

I ate sushi. The one on the far left is a caterpillar.

Dema ate earwax.

I hugged a giant teddy bear at Costco.

And I ate a bunch of Chex.

Cinnamon Chex aren't as good as Honey Nut Chex, but they're ok.

So that's that.

I'm currently applying to PhD programs. Twelve of them, to be exact: Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Rutgers, UT-Austin, Washington, UCLA, Stanford, Berkeley, NYU, Cornell, and Columbia. It's a prestigious list (because I have a big head).

I've also made it through two rounds of the Foreign Service hiring process. There's an opening in Brazil. I didn't even have to take the FSOT (the Foreign Service test). A few months ago I filled out an application, which included six essays, and then last Monday I passed the over-the-telephone preliminary language test. We talked politics, which is not my strong suit, but I passed. I'm pretty sure the next step is to go to Washington DC for a face-to-face interview. Guess we'll see.

Anyways, I'm rambling, so this post should end. Maybe I'll take pictures of places I work next (there are currently three of them) for the next one.

Maybe not.