Dear Family,
Firstly, I’d like to try to convey how much I love the month of April. Every time it comes around, I’m just a little happier. Maybe it’s the perfect weather, the important events, or the feeling of impending final exams (meaning impending freedom from obligation to study); I’m not sure what it is about April that I feel gives me an excuse to just be happy to exist in April, but whatever it is, I’ll happily take it.
Usually, one of the aforementioned important events is Easter, which is a beautiful holiday that always makes me happy, but this year March stole it from my favorite month. It’s okay though, seeing as March really doesn’t have much else going for it (except for Grace’s birthday, of course *blow kiss*).
Perhaps subconsciously in defiance of this injustice, I scheduled our ward’s Easter activity for April 1st. The reasoning was that everybody had to be back from whatever weekend excursions they took for the holiday by Monday night, seeing as we had classes during the day.
I’ve been on my ward’s activities committee for the past several months, but I only recently became the head of this committee (or, well, co-chair, but that’s a whole other power dynamic that seems to be unique to young single adult wards in the Church). This was going to be the first activity that really felt like *mine*, so my committee and I advertised the life out of our Easter Feast. I’m pretty sure I announced to my Sunday school class that I would be really really sad and cry if they didn’t come.
It worked. They came.
It’s funny, I was way more stressed than I had any reason to be. I spent about two hours before the event hard boiling eggs (which I had never actually done before…I figured it wouldn’t be that hard and the eggs were just going to be used for dying anyway, so it would be fine) before driving to the church to set up and meet my committee, only to find out the church building was locked. I called all of my powerful connections and eventually someone was able to provide a key.
Then we got inside the building and everyone kept asking me to make decisions, which is one of my least favorite things to do. At once, it feels satisfying to know that people value my opinion and see me as someone who knows what she’s doing and it’s scary to think that people can easily blame me when things don’t go according to plan.
But it went so well! By which I mean people came, there was enough food, and people played games and spoke to one another. I never had particularly high aspirations, so that was everything I could have wished for while planning our ward’s Easter activity.
I’m honestly not sure what happened to all of the hard boiled eggs. But that was a month ago now and I haven’t heard any complaints or seen any vague and threatening emails from the stake, so I think it worked out. I’m just glad I didn’t have to take them home.
Then, with that big event out of the way, I could focus fully on the next great thing about April: my birthday.
It’s interesting to consider how my approach to celebrating my birthday has changed throughout my life, moving from thriving as the center of attention of elaborate party plans as a small child, to oddly embarrassed and quiet as an adolescent, to something that I think is a little more balanced as a young adult. Considering that I kept my birthday a secret from even some of my close friends in high school to avoid garnering unwanted attention, I think it shows significant character growth that I shared with my Thursday class on April fourth that my birthday was the following day when the teacher asked if we had any news to share.
I also shared the news with a few of my coworkers, who kindly and loudly shared it with all of my other coworkers, who were reasonable enough not to match the energy level of the few who blasted “22” by Taylor Swift and took a few paid minutes to dance along while I kind of watched them, kind of kept on quality checking copies of “Preach My Gospel” (more on this later). It was funny and a little awkward, but they’re all remarkably self-confident people.
I’ve recently learned that it is generally kind to give people a reason to celebrate. While I grew up in a household of individuals who don’t necessarily enjoy large social gatherings, we all still generally seem to enjoy the opportunity to celebrate one another or other close friends and family. Birthdays never went unacknowledged in our house, even if our celebrations of them became pretty intimate and routine once we were all out of elementary school.
This year, I was extremely grateful for my two roommates, who made sure I was available to grab lunch with them to celebrate, and to my little circle of friends who came to my apartment and played a few games with me in the evening. The older I get, the more I realize that it doesn’t take too much work to celebrate, but people generally appreciate some excuse to break from the routine and do something with people they care about.
The Saturday and Sunday following my birthday were filled with General Conference, another reason I have to love the month of April. The first weekend of every April is reserved for two days of broadcast messages from leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, replacing our weekly two-hour Sunday service with several more hours of Christ-focused TV viewing.
Watching Conference in Provo, Utah is usually a different experience from watching it in Maryland, simply because there are so many viewing options. When I’m in Maryland, I just watch Conference at home with my family. When I’m in Utah, I usually watch each session of Conference (of which there are five, each around two hours long) in a different location because someone I know is hosting a watch party for a different session, likely with some promised food offering to entice college students to come to their watch party and not go to someone else’s.
This time, I only actually attended one of these little parties and watched every other session with Luke, which is honestly a much more reviving and spiritually-focused way to spend the weekend.
The one event that I did attend was hosted by a woman in my Russian class. She provided an astonishing amount of food and plenty of couch space in her parents’ home, and I went with my classmate, Ali. We were surprised that we received invitations to this event, seeing as neither of us knew the woman hosting it very well, but we were pleased nonetheless. We also had a little theory we were developing: we were curious to see how many of the classmates who we suspected of having a crush on the woman hosting would show up to the gathering, hoping this would confirm or deny our hunches regarding potential relationship drama in the Russian class.
Unfortunately, the only guy who showed up from our class was one who we were pretty certain had no interest in our hostess. So that was a bit of a bust, but Conference was still quite good.
Now onto a less pleasant item that has nevertheless consumed about 20 hours of each week this month: quality checking.
The BYU Bindery is a place for which I am grateful; it gives me a job, it lets me feel like I’m doing something relevant to more than just me, and it puts me in close proximity with lovely people who do the wordle with me on our ten minute breaks. It’s a good job.
Sometimes, however, it is just so completely soul-sucking.
I recently became a student supervisor in charge of quality checking the books that we make before we send them out to the customer. The funny thing about this is that my boss seems to consider me to be a particular expert on quality just because I have the title, when, in reality, all I know about our standards for quality are the tidbits I’ve picked up from his observations over the course of the last several months. I have received no formal training.
But, I have the title (which he gave me), and so I am the bindery expert.
Of course, some problems don’t really take an expert to catch.
The other funny thing about this is that, despite being the leading expert on quality at the bindery, I am by far the least picky quality checker on the team of people I lead, most of whom I trained myself. This leads to hours spent staring at every page of every book, looking for the smallest blemish that our customer (most often the Church) might see as cause to send back the order. This is not in itself a bad thing but the awkward thing is that this checking always happens at the very end of the book-making process. And most of the time, the error occurred during the printing, which is the first step.
This means that by the time we’re checking them and dividing books into good and bad, a very large percentage of the books already have the same error because the people at the printers, cutters, and punchers never caught it. So instead of compiling books, we just spend hours staring at pages and then setting whole books aside to be recycled because we found a blemish that’s been there since the beginning.
Anyway, it’s really funny to come home from checking every single page for any unerasable mark over 1/32 inch to the Washington D.C. distribution center:
Here’s what I think happened: the Church (to whom we send books for missionaries who will be going into the field from the MTC) is extremely picky with the quality of their books, but Deseret Book (who I think must stock our distribution centers), doesn’t seem to care that much. Which is *fascinating* because while DB supplies items to paying customers, the Church exclusively gives these books out for *free*. So it’s really interesting that DB doesn’t care about this terrible back while the Church definitely would. Especially since I can guarantee that the missionaries receiving these books do not care when they find a smudge on page 38 of their Preach My Gospel.
Which is all kind of beside the point since, regardless of who the job is going to—we are getting paid and should probably try to put out quality books. But for some reason, that’s really hard to do. So I complain in this letter, and not to the Church.
The reason I was in the distribution center under the temple in the first place is because I was hanging out with my lovely friend Ilse Eskelsen and her mom, Emily, while they bought some temple clothing there in preparation for our temple session the next day. I am so glad I got to go to the temple and worship there with them, since the ordinances there always seem to feel a little more special when I’m with people I love.
Ilse is one of my oldest friends. She also goes to BYU and love that I get to see her both when I’m in Utah and when I’m on the east coast, since we’re both from the DMV.
Ilse has been the biggest supporter of Maryland club for the short time it has existed, and she also inspired the Eskelsen-Willis tribe of Provo to continue our greatest Maryland tradition this year in our Smith Island Cake: Utah crossover episode on Reading Day, the day that separates the last day of class from the first day of finals week.
Tommy, Lola (Tommy’s girlfriend), Ilse, Luke, and I all got together and made the cake without any adult supervision (unless you count Ilse, who made sure we actually referenced the recipe while making the cake, something I have become increasingly disinclined to do over the past year or two), and I’d say it was a success, even if it wasn’t the neatest looking cake to ever come out of this end-of-school tradition.
I finished my finals with only a few snags (I forgot to take one of them…my professor was kind enough to open it up for me though) and flew home to Maryland on Thursday, where I plan to spend the first half of my summer before flying to Latvia. If, for whatever reason, you’d like a more in-depth description of my flight itinerary to Latvia, you can read Dad’s April letter, which lays out the whole thing, despite the fact that I’m not actually leaving until the end of June.
As I wrap up this letter, I’m actually sitting on the front porch of Southern Virginia University’s Main Hall, and I’m struck by the beauty of this little campus three hours from home, as well as by the abnormality of both a main hall and a front porch on a campus, since I’m pretty sure there isn’t anything at BYU that I would describe as either of those things.
I came to visit Grace, even though she’ll be joining the family (sans Hannah) in Maryland once she has finished all of her SVU obligations on Friday. I guess I was just excited to see her. She’s giving me a tour of campus and introducing me to her friends, a few of whom have been able to guess who I am without much prompting.
All in all, it’s been a good month filled with great people and opportunities. I’m so grateful for my education and I’m grateful for this break now. I love you all and hope you won’t hesitate to reach out and say hi if you ever feel the desire to. It’s something I’m trying to be better about doing myself.
Love,
Sophie
Senior Contributor to The Famlet Monthly