Dear Family,
This month, I just love people. I’ve been getting better at interacting with important people in my life in the spare moments, and I’ve noticed that they’ve also been trying a little harder to spend time with me. And it just makes me so happy. A friend from a previous semester stopped by my first class of the week just to say hi, another pair of friends stopped by my apartment because they’d been on a walk in the neighborhood, and one of my best friends from my freshman year drove down from Layton to have lunch with me and a former roommate.
I’m never really lonely since dating Luke, but there’s something so special about having other people who are as happy to see you as you are to see them. I sometimes wonder if everyone feels some version of what I’m about to describe, but I notice people more often than they notice me. I walk on campus and I see so many people I know. It makes me happy. Three years into school here, I now have a harder time bringing their attention to me when it doesn’t come naturally. I just let myself enjoy the serendipity of our presence in the same space on a vast campus and move on, not wanting to bother them.
You can imagine, then, how happy I am when someone notices me and says hello. Because I’m not a bother and they do want to interact with me. Again, I just love people.
I also love strangers I share classes with.
One classmate that I’m particularly intrigued by right now is a girl I sat next to one class and saw that she had an Apple Note open on her computer with all of our classmates’ names on it. Some of the names had a seemingly arbitrary number to the left of it and a short phrase to the right that listed one detail about the student. One girl showed up as “2 Bailey — horse girl,” for example. Half or maybe a few more than half had some sort of description and most had a number.
I had neither, and I think about that a lot.
I’m not sure whether it’s a good thing to be a notable individual on this hit list or not, but I kind of want to know what my number and personal description would be! The curiosity keeps me going to class every day, though I haven’t actually seen the list for a few weeks now.
And then there’s this chemistry major in my classroom management course, who sometimes teaches us life principles using chemistry that very few people in the room understand before the professor comes.
I think in this instance he was trying to explain the principle of consolidating appliances and organizing a kitchen after getting married. It was one of those tangents in which I was pretty sure he didn’t say anything offensive, but I honestly couldn’t tell.
Later in the class, he did end up knowing off the top of his head how many women have ever won the Nobel Prize and tacking on his opinion that there should probably be more on the list. Grace said this makes him husband material (her exact words were, “ring check?”), but as any chemist can probably tell from the picture, the man is already taken. My apologies to the two single women who read this letter.
If you are someone who interacts with people on a college campus, you know that we’re getting to the point in the semester where every time you ask someone how their week went, they answer with one of three options:
1. Oh, you know (my go-to),
2. We’re just getting through one day at a time, or
3. *tired exhale*
No one even tries pretending they’re having a good time anymore (if in fact they aren’t), which is a little sad, but also kind of nice when you all know everyone’s feeling it. I suppose I’d rather that everyone felt like they could genuinely say they’re having a good week, but I’m glad that we don’t always pretend to be happier than we are.
On the other hand, I actually do consider myself quite happy a lot of the time. Around 3PM is not my strongest hour mental-health wise, but by the time I’ve finished my three hour shift at the bindery, I feel refreshed and ready to go home and do homework. Poor Luke has usually gotten most of his homework done by the time I’m starting mine and has to find things to do to stay busy while I frantically try to get everything done for tomorrow’s classes. He’s very good about supporting me in my schoolwork, as well as making me eat and take breaks when I’m the most stressed. I’m very grateful for him.
He has also been the sole force motivating me to finish designing and send in the order to print our wedding invitations and envelopes. With his ability to get things done before the very last minute and excel knowledge, paired with my ability to manipulate basic on templates on Canva and access to a 20% employee discount off printing through the bindery, we make a semi-decent wedding-invitation-producing team.
So if you’re reading this and wondering where your invite is, I promise we’re working on it. But I’m flattered that you think about me enough to wonder when your next piece of mail from me will be.
Speaking of wedding preparations, there are a few things that stress me out this semester and make me cry sometimes, like research projects, paying to replace brakes, and thinking about finals week.
As I continue to read increasingly vast amounts of academic journal articles that come from search terms like “modeling writing in the secondary classroom” and “story truth vs happening truth the things they carried” and “how did people in South Vietnam feel about the Vietnam war,” I come across several styles of academic language, many of which seem somewhat pointless to me.
My new favorite subordinating conjunction (I know, a thriller of a sentence starter, but don’t give up on me) is the word “parenthetically,” to indicate an addendum of questionable necessity which you would have put in parentheses if it weren’t your whole job to write 15-page articles using creative and diverse subordinating conjunctions to keep your readers from thinking they read the same paragraph twice on accident. Though, parenthetically, this reader probably did anyway.
Sometimes the classes that provide me with assignments that require filling up my search history with all of these random inquiries make me anxious, but I’d still say that I quite enjoy all of them. I enjoy preparing to become a teacher, learning specific strategies that make me a better reader and writer, and developing relationships with my classmates who I share many classes with, like the ones I described earlier. It’s fun to get to the point in a relatively small program where I’m meeting fewer and fewer new people every semester and largely getting to know the same old people better.
There are plenty of other things that make me happy, like my friends ( a.k.a people!), the feeling I get when I’m researching and finding myself legitimately engaged by what I’m learning, and Luke playing with my roommate’s cat even though he’s very allergic to her.
Getting in touch with childhood friends also makes me very happy. Maryland club didn’t meet this month, but the White Oak Ward boys did invite me to a little Halloween party, which reminded me how nice it is to feel like people want to spend time with me.
And then there are the things that I feel like should’ve made me cry but didn’t, like accidentally slicing my finger while chopping potatoes at 7:30 AM and consequently being distracted while the oil burned onto the pot I was heating up to cook said potatoes. The smoke alarm went off and I was frantically trying to open windows and fan smoke away from the alarm with a cutting board so it wouldn’t wake my roommates, which, of course, it did, and poor Hannah walked into the kitchen to see me wielding a cutting board, blood all over my hand, and, thankfully, no evidence of anything else wrong besides some lingering smoke in the air, curling away from my flapping board. She got me a few bandaids and went back to sleep. And that was the first of two times I set off the smoke alarm while cooking potatoes early in the morning. I was much better prepared the second time, so it didn’t seem to wake anyone and therefore wasn’t as memorable.
I have since then cooked potatoes (something I swore off of for a few weeks) multiple times without anything going wrong.
In news unrelated to potatoes, I traveled a little farther than I otherwise would to see family, since Luke has grandparents in St. George and Tremonton, Utah whom he loves and likes to spend time with. We drove down a few hours to St. George to watch General Conference with two of his grandparents, and then two weeks later drove up to Tremonton to spend a weekend with the other two.
I’m not sure whether the saying “four seasons and a road trip” is as common in other places and cultures as it is here (somewhat ironically), but I was surprised to realize recently that I’ve actually followed the advice for the minimum amount of time one should date a significant other before marrying him, assuming you count a weekend trip to St. George a road trip, which maybe you don’t. Luke and I started dating mid-January of this year, which, is almost an entire year from our wedding date less than two months in the future. The time constraint never seemed super necessary to me, and most people I know haven’t followed it, but I guess I’m just a slowpoke.
I bring this up because the last time Luke and I discussed the four seasons/road trip rule, it was when we were visiting his St. George grandparents sometime in the spring. I asked whether the trip counted as a road trip and he responded, “well maybe it counts, but I’m not too worried about that since that would mean I want to wait four seasons to get married.”
Joke’s on him. Here we are four seasons later, not quite married. Or maybe the joke is on me. I’m grateful for the time I’ve had to get to know him and his family better and become more and more excited to just get married already.
Regardless of whether the advice is necessary, I’ve enjoyed the trips to Luke’s grandparents over the past few weeks, and I think we’ll have to go on a few longer ones to visit some of my family a little farther away.
This month has helped me realize how nice my future family is. It’s also helped me greater see that in my current family, but I already feel that pretty strongly most of the time. But my future family has been so accepting of me, helpful in wedding planning, and just incredibly warm and excited. I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve it, but I’m very grateful for them and excited to have a much larger family in a little less than two months.
People! I just love ‘em.
And I love you too.
Talk to you soon,
Sophie
Senior Contributor to The Famlet Monthly