My new pastime

While working at the library purchasing the sometimes exotic and rare but usually boring and technical books for professors across campus, I am given the luxury of being able to listen to anything I want. I have never had this freedom at a job before and immediately took advantage of it by listening to the online radio, Pandora.com. However, I often found myself quite bored. I had heard most of the songs before and when I heard a song I didn't recognize I often didn't like it. Then I decided to listen to white noise online, but that was even more boring because the work I was doing was inherently dull. I figure that white noise is only good to listen to when you have some intense thinking to do.
I then discovered talk radio. At first I listened to the conservative talk radio, but they repeated themselves a lot of the time and got angry a lot, too. I didn't like the way I felt while listening to it. I wanted something that talked about the lighter, more interesting side of life.


That's when I discovered This American Life. It's a weekly broadcast where they select a theme and invite writers to address that theme with a story. They usually feature three or four stories in each episode. The themes can be basically anything; from telephones to politics. I usually listen to two or three episodes while at work and it has made work so enjoyable.

I don't know if any of you have heard of it or have listened to it, but I highly recommend it. The internet address is ThisAmericanLife.org.


I think my favorite one is a story about babysitting, mainly because the things the older brother did in that story remind me of things that my older brother would do to me, or that I would do to my younger brother. I also enjoyed the story of the woman who trained herself to become a superhero. And then there is the story of the 10 year old American girl who became pen pals with Manuel Noriega, the drug trafficking, murderous general of Argentina.

In any case, its worth trying.

In other news, I have had a change in my career choice. A few weeks ago, sometime last month, I had a dream. In that dream, I was an optometrist. I often have weird dreams involving things that seem to be all out of order and make no sense, but this one was different. With my other dreams, they are often ignored and/or forgotten. But I couldn't get this dream out of my mind. In order to ease my mind and hopefully put it past me, I decided to research optometry a little bit. There is a pre-optometry organization on campus and they provided me with a lot of information and internet links that provide more information. The amazing this is that the more I learned, the more excited I got. I went into an optometrist's office and shadowed the optometrist for a while and asked him some of my questions. I then prayed and fasted about it and it really felt like something I want to do and something that would benefit other people's direct lives. The only problem is that my major is construction management...how many more years of schooling would I have to take? Overall, just one. Turns out that my baccalaureate degree can be in anything I want, as long as I take all the necessary prerequisites. These include things like anatomy, physiology, lots of chemistry, microbiology, and other things. After graduating from BYU, there are four years of optometry school, which is similar to medical school but only pertaining to eye related things.
I was worried what Katie would say in response to all of this, but she was very supportive and wanted me to be happy. I think she was happy to learn that optometrists generally have very stable jobs and work schedules with enough money to support a family, and with only one more year of schooling compared to architecture, it doesn't make that much of a difference (except when you look at the price of schooling these days...).