this is me

"I’ve got a problem with procrastination. And it’s especially bad now, because I’ve got this opportunity to write for a music magazine. The thing is… I know what I should be doing: reaching out to bands, doing interviews, networking with new bands before they get big. I know that it’s going to involve hustling every single day. And I hope this doesn’t make me sound like a loser, but I have trouble getting revved up on any given day to start down the path."
"Can I give one piece of advice?"
"Sure."
"Instead of focusing on the million things you need to do to be successful, focus on two or three things you can do to move forward each day. The quickest way out of paralysis is a simple daily routine."
via humans of new york

thoughts on monday

this post actually started out as "thoughts on tuesday"...and it has gotten pushed back like three times. 

some people think it would be nice to have a whole bunch of free time to do whatever you want all day. it's really not that fun. it gets really old really fast. of course, i do have things i can be doing--it just always seems like the day goes by without me accomplishing much of anything. i need to fix this. i am starting anew.

i've been watching new girl over the past couple weeks. i think one of the main purposes of that show is for zooey deschanel to wear adorable dresses and to make me covet them.

i love netflix, but i'm really not on board with the whole "netflix original series" thing. netflix basically has no rules, which means that these new original shows can pretty much have whatever content they want. i will never understand why "artistry" for some reason means portraying promiscuity, profanity, and "mature themes." there's my rant for the day.

i've somehow gotten into this pattern of staying up really really late. this, of course, causes me to sleep in a lot later than i would like. and it's also to the point where i feel like i can't get to sleep until those wee hours of the night/morning. it is not good.

saturday, we were driving home from salt lake, and we saw this huge rainbow. i love rainbows. and i kind of love this wacky weather, almost the reverse of england weather, where it is sunny all morning and early afternoon and then suddenly starts pouring, complete with thunder and lightning, late afternoon. it did make for a weird end to our day at the waterpark last week, though.

that's it for me for now :)

a full fourth

this year, the holiday was dedicated to spending time with family and generally having a lot of fun. we went to the north salt lake fireworks extravaganza, like always, and they were amazing. a little girl in our ward, and one of mom's best friends, ruby, sat by me during the fireworks show, which made it all even more entertaining :) can we add some kids to our family already or what?

on the morning of the fourth, we crawled out of bed for the annual foxhill ward fourth of july breakfast. the food was plentiful, and we had a beesley family first when five of us, everyone minus dad, performed the star spangled banner. i think this could be the beginning of a wonderful and successful career for the star spangled beesleys.

that night, we headed down to provo for the stadium of fire. how we convinced dad to get us tickets for that, i still don't know, but it was awesome. sure, it was hot, and we were packed into the bleachers like shoes in my suitcase, but we still had fun. at least, i did. as the concert approached, i started to get more and more excited to see kelly clarkson. i don't consider myself to be a huge kelly fan, but i realized, in the days leading up to the show, that i know a lot of her songs, and most of them i actually really like. so her set was pretty great--i knew every song, and she even played this duet, originally sung with jason aldean, that we are obsessed with.

 

 she was so good, singing her heart out. it was altogether great. i would definitely see her again, and even though it took us about an hour to get out of the parking lot (and even though we had talked about ways to avoid all of that...), i would totally go to stadium of fire again, depending on the performer.

and that was my fourth! happy birthday, america!

some things i've been thinking about

i've been on a nonfiction kick lately, drawn to the biography and essay sections when i head over to
the provo library. the other day, though, a novel caught my eye as i was on my way to check out. it had a metallic cover, which always helps.

i just finished it: my name is memory by ann brashares, the author of the sisterhood of the traveling pants series. the main premise of the story is that every person has lived before, perhaps hundreds of years' worth of lives, dozens of births and deaths. the main character, daniel, is special (of course--he's the main character of a somewhat supernatural novel); he can remember all of his past lives, which makes each of his existences interesting in that he knows that this life is not his only one--he has lived, loved, and died before, and he will again. this is interesting to me mainly because this, in part, is what the gospel is all about. not that we have lived many times before in various reincarnations and milieus, but that this mortal life isn't all we have. we have lived before, and we will live again after we die.

the other really interesting idea that brashares introduces is that your soul, the thing that you do carry with you through all these lives, in some way or another, makes an impression on each body and life that you inhabit. the female protagonist, lucy, has a scar on her left arm from an injury she received in a past life. some of her likes and dislikes, fears and insecurities, inherent qualities, stem from things that happened to her before she was lucy. i know that's true in reality, too. our personalities stay with us. there is something holy and eternal about each of us that transcends mortality and ties us to divinity. we are incredibly unique, but we are known.

i listened to an episode of this american life last week called "switched at birth." like every episode, this one featured a fascinating story about two women who were switched in a hospital as newborns, the mother who knew as soon as she got home, and what happened to their lives when she finally broke the news 43 years later. this is obviously a crazy thing to contemplate, but something, related to the ideas in this book, really struck me. each of the girls, when they met their biological families, realized how much they were like those people and not the family they were raised with. one of the women, marty, was outgoing and funny and popular, just like her birth family, the mcdonalds, and vice versa with the other family. this is such a weird thing to me. isn't a lot of your personality formed by your environment? why didn't marty become more like the family she was raised with, the millers? this suggests that much of our personality is actually genetic rather than socially constructed. crazy!

just some random thoughts for your tuesday.

on this day

i wrote this on saturday, but for some reason i've been on something of an internet fast since then. but i'm posting it anyway.

four years ago, i flew from salt lake to new york to shannon, ireland.

this is me when i first stepped outside, out into the first blustery day of the trip. this was the first leg of an amazing study abroad experience.

i was afraid, at first, to be honest. i didn't have any great friends going into the trip, it was the first time i would really be away from home, out of the country, and i can always find a million other things to worry about. it didn't help that, in the terminal at kennedy airport, waiting for the flight that would take me across an ocean, my computer inexplicably wouldn't turn on. so, for those first few days and nights, i fretted over whether i would ever be able to talk to my family or how i would upload pictures. i feared that all my worries would be confirmed.

eventually, my computer worked again. i made friends. i talked to my family and posted pictures on facebook. i had an incredible time. a four year anniversary seems as good a time as any to revisit it all, right?