BYU Dating Reform: Part 1

So over at Date Club Prophecies you’ll find a pseudo-serious but still thought provoking (in some ways) discussion of dating. Honestly, dating in its present form at Brigham Young University and in the United States in general seems inadequate as a match-making institution and perhaps needs some reenvigorating. Here are some of my thoughts.

The Dilemma

For those who are not familiar with the BYU dating scene, we here are rather traditional as far as the responsibilities of guys compared to the responsibilities of girls when it comes to dating. So it’s incumbent on a guy to ask out a girl. Only very rarely do the girls take the initiative in asking out a guy, and then it is often (at least by me) interpreted as overly aggressive, a definite sign that she must have the hots for you. Just as guys often interpret a girl asking them on a date as a sign of very significant interest, girls often feel that if a guy asks them out more than once, he must have already made up his mind to marry her and is now “moving in for the kill”.

This paranoia is partly founded in BYU’s history and reputation as the “marriage capitol of the world:” some who graduate from BYU single would like to get their money back because they thought that a guaranteed marriage proposal was included with the price of tuition. Probably more significant than the effect of elevated expectations, it’s likely that the girls’ fears of creepy pursuit are based on the collective bad experiences of all modernday BYU women. There are without doubt guys who pursue girls with a singleminded intensity that terrifies their “quarry” and for whom a single date seems like sure confirmation that the girl is ready for marriage. I have known guys with this mindset; indeed, I’ve to some extent been part of this mindset. Creepy guys in Central Park make everybody in New York afraid of their neighbors. Creepy guys in the BYU dating pool make girls afraid of the rest of us.

The Most Frightening Possibility

But casting all of the blame at the feet of “those creepy guys” is avoiding the most frightening possibility: What if it’s me? This thought must eventually enter the mind of all but the most dense and egotistical of BYU’s despairing bachelors: What if I can’t get a girlfriend — can’t even get a girl to go on more than one date with me without getting creeped out — because I’m just not cool enough? What if I just don’t have what it takes to compete in the cut-throat competition for a chica? Oooh, what a dark and hideous thought that one is!

The notion lie that somebody is simply not “cool enough” is total garbage. That idea assumes that the likelihood of the desired result (getting a girlfriend) is a function of the “coolness” (whatever that means) of the guy seeking it. This is true for those whose entire existence revolves around external form and superficiality rather than quality of character and spirit. But for the rest of us… well, there are patterns. More energetic, flirtacious people probably have an easier time getting into relationships because they’re capable of attracting more positive attention at themselves. But overall — I like to tell myself — there are more important factors, especially when you consider not just “hooking up,” but doing so with somebody that you really respect and admire, who’s more than merely an attractive figure.

What are these factors and how do you employ them to your advantage? Stay tuned for Part 2 of BYU Dating Reform where we’ll consider Five Totally Speculative Non-Guaranteed Steps to Getting Your First Girlfriend.

Eighties Heritage Month

Paris makes more than the law, it makes the fashion

–Victor Hugo in Les Miserables

Would it be accurate to say that prior to the 20th century, very few people had the luxury of worrying about fashion? The impression I get when I read an old novel is that back in “the day” the rich (and the middle class, when there was one) were the only segment of society who weren’t struggling merely to survive and were able to fritter away their time pursuing the latest fashions.

In today’s unprecedented affluence, we have the luxury of falling into the cycle of fashion: ever in need of something new to stimulate our minds and our senses, we are not only willing to put up with frequent change in styles and trends, but we actually welcome it. Just what the girls (and the fashion-minded guys out there) always wanted: an excuse to buy new clothes. But with all of this desire for something novel to entertain us, it seems that the best we can do is rehash the clothes and accessories and hairstyles of the past into a short-lived fashion du jour.

Take, for example, the “comebacks” that the 1970’s and 1980’s have seen in the last ten years or so. Really, as much as I might be inclined to condemn this preoccupation with style as “frittering,” I also think that some parts of those decades’ wardrobes were just plain sweet. But I am a traditionalist; I’d rather see a comeback of some ’30’s and ’40’s stuff. And you know what, I think we do see a bit of that. I would honestly rather wear some nice slacks and a collared shirt to school. I just feel better when I dress a little bit nice!

But anyway, tonight some friends of mine threw an ’80’s dance party, complete with the music, the clothes, and the sweetly-ghetto Namco video game system. Nothing like a round of Galaga to bring back the good ol’ days. I suggested that we campaign to get Congress to make July or August be National Eighties Heritage Month. Why not take some time to acknowledge the great debt we owe to those poor souls who suffered through the side pony-tails, the short shorts and the midriff shirts, the big hair, the nasty, heavy makeup, the big striped tube socks and the fat old baseball caps to bring about a decade or two where we can be free from the oppression of fashion illogic. And then, whenever (if ever?) David Bowie dies, we’ll make his birthday into a holiday as well.

Long live the eighties! But don’t let them live for too long — we need to get on to the next big fashion… the nineties?

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Learning C++

I’m taking (actually, retaking) Computer Science 240 right now. So I’m learning C++. This is someting I’ve always wanted to do. I was maybe 10 years old when we got Turbo C++. My dad was the only one who knew how to use it, but still, I had fun playing with the “Heap Walker” program. I wasn’t able to learn simply by experimentation, like I did with QBASIC. Now, having paid some of my dues with tuition and time, I feel like I’m learning the language. The project we’re working on right now in class is an implementation of make. I’ve been hacking away, learning how to deal with circular #include’s, finding memory leaks and fixing segmentation faults. Maybe sometime soon I’ll be able to start contributing to some Open Source projects - another long-time goal of mine.

Here’s something I would like to code into KDevelop: a plugin that allows the file list sidebar to be sorted to have the most recently used files on top. Somehow there has to be a more optimal way to switch between source files than pushing Ctrl+/ and typing the name of the file, or moving the mouse cursor over to click on the ‘File List’ sidebar button, then back over to the file that you want to open. How about a key combination that cycles through the last five most recently used files? There must be some better way.

I Cast Mine Pod at Thee!

Lately I’ve been listening to the UbuntuOS podcast about the Ubuntu Linux distro. It’s a good show, for sure, though there’s a bit too much down time where the guys are just sitting there saying, “Yeah….uh…. so linux is pretty cool, yeah…” It really does remind me of my conversations with my brother, but with some more varietous viewpoints.

The people on the ‘cast are constantly citing website addresses or terminal commands. It would be useful to develop a technology that would allow the people speaking on the podcast to send text directly to the listeners. Imagine the show mentions a website, and up pops in the corner of your screen or your media player a notification window. Why not use libnotify/notification-daemon? Actually, such a technology already exists in the form of Vorbis metadata. At least one program, called FreeCast, seems to have a feature like that.

Last night at some absurdly late hour (as if 2:30am isn’t late) I read a the keynote from OLS. I was very impressed with the debunking of the “Linux has no device support” myth. It’s worth a read.

Amigote vuelve a levantarse la cabeza fea

Ahhhhrrhrhrhrhhaarrrrhhhhhh! That’s the sound of a thousand joints popping and creaking as I stretch out my blogging muscles. Faithful reader (how can you be a faithful reader of a blog that never posts!?), surely you have observed that a burning VW van no longer graces the top of our beloved peasant kingdom. I did love that burned out terrorist conveyance, but our ways have parted like Hamilton and Burr, like Lenin and Trotsky, like a pizza delivery boy and his sweet pepperoni confections. Now the reign of the ostrich is upon us, and it’s time for another Blog Identity CrisisTM. No, I take that back. The last time we peered into the soul of The Vato, we unearthed an unbearable horror that ought not to afflict humanity again for another milennium.

Entonces… la cosa es que debo explicarles los acontecios de mi vida de los meses que he pasado sin blogear nada. First is that I passed my morphology/phonology class (Linguistics 427) with an A, giving me a 4.0 GPA in all of the classes in the major except for the Senior Seminar (490) which I should take in the fall semester. I’m very glad about that, and I owe the good grade very much to the Lord for helping me to stay sane and do my best, and to my study group, the legendary MorphoMasters.

Second is that the good ol’ español is suffering from serious neglect. Not a single class in the language since fall of last year! My little snippets of spanish in this and other posts are surely riddled with grammar errors that would make my 321 professor choke on his mole poblano (assuming he eats such delights with any degree of regularity.)

Third, I’m now retaking Computer Science 240, which I failed two years ago before I decided to bail out on the CS major. It’s going well so far, with two of our labs done, and the programming exam passed on the second try. The class is a basic course in C++ and advanced programming methodology. Being a great Linux user and fan, this is filling in an critical gap in my skills and knowledge. It’s a good feeling, although I doubt I’ll still be saying that when we’re in the throes of the reimplimentation of ‘make’ or the last project, a chess game. But at this point, with a big black mark on my GPA coming from my previous attempt at this class, I have absolutely nothing to lose (except for a bit of tuition money, of course). Hopefully all will go well!

Fourth, I’ve been following the situation in North Korea very closely, my main sources of information being the Korea Liberator and NKZone blogs listed in the “Liberation” section of my blogroll.

All my love to my friends and family, if I can ever persuade them to keep tabs on my blog!
- Josh