Is This Real Life? Why You Should Never Give Out Your Number at a Bonfire

The title may actually be kind of wrong, considering that I am actually going to a bonfire this weekend, and I may or may not end up handing out my number. But let me explain.

My first semester at BYU-Idaho, we went to the sand dunes every now and then to  have a bonfire   crash other people's fires. Basically, we would get a car full of people, drive to the dunes, pick a bonfire at random and join their party, because none of us wanted to buy/steal/locate firewood. It was at one of these gatherings where I started trying to make friends.

Now, before we go any farther, let me point out this was a very dark and windy moonless night. No joke. The fire we had picked was super hot and so bright that rather than casting light, it just made everything around it seem darker. This meant that the most you could see of anyone was vague facial features when the firelight chose to lean in their direction. Other than that, not much was visible aside from a general outline showing you the approximate size of your neighbors.

So, I had started talking to these two man-sized outlines, sort of flirting but mostly just talking to pass the time. The taller and bulkier of them mentioned he was into swing dancing, which got me all kinds of excited due to some past experiences I'll talk about later. As the night went on, the fire got smaller and visibility got poorer, but I kept talking to the dark patch of air where (I was pretty sure) this guy was standing. I don't remember his name, but I think it started with a J? Maybe John? Jason? Josh? Anyway, Jackson/Jake/James ended up getting my number and my group left. While the other 12 people in the suburban talked and laughed about an event I had missed due to J-Kid, I laid awkwardly across two laps and under someone's legs and wondered if it was a good idea to give out my number to a random guy I had barely even seen.

The next week was my good friend John Moore's birthday party. I made him this super manly cake, featuring all of his favorite things: me, a million dollars and on the sides: his family, a monkey, the temple, and a missionary name tag. Yeah, we're Mormon.

So anyway, random bonfire guy texted me the day of John's party saying "hey cutie ;) any partyes tonite?" Ignoring the red flags of 1.) an emoticon in place of punctuation and 2.) gross misspellings, I told him about John's party. Fast forward half a day and the party begins. Random friends of John showed up with various desserts, we played ping pong and air hockey and never have I ever. We took tons of pictures.

This is John the birthday boy, not Random Bonfire Guy who's name may have also been John.

About 30 minutes into it, I get a text from Mr. Nameless telling me he was there. And through the door comes someone who gave off an impression like this:

He was way more of a tool than his dune-fire outline could have possibly suggested. The first thing I noticed, (as he pulled me into an overwhelmingly abercrombie-cologned hug) was that his TAPOUT shirt was at least 3 sizes too small. Then, above his acid-washed jeans that had more holes than the average colander, was a giant, rhinestone studded, gun-shaped belt buckle. No joke.  After taking a step back, I noticed the wide leather sharktooth necklace that concealed about half of a neck tattoo. Fortunately, he coordinated well with several leather bracelets, a LiveStrong band, a balance band, and even better, no fewer than 4 silver rings. To top it all off, he had white sunglasses nestled among the gel-covered, highlighted spikes of his hair.

 I wish I was making this up. Or even exaggerating.

Needless to say, I was shocked and confused and a little dizzy from the excessive cologne. So we talked for a bit, someone showed him the cake I made John and he suggested that I make him a cake for his birthday coming up soon. Well, in his words, "Tons of chicks wanna make my cake, but you should do it, dude." Dude. He called me dude. He then called John "broseph." I fought the urge to puke.

He quickly realized (thanks to none-too-subtle hints from me) that we were very, very different and probably should never speak again. The whole party moved to another complex's lounge so we could play murder in the dark, and he left at some point, not saying goodbye to anyone, with a random girl and three slices of cake, never to be heard from again.

I spent the rest of the night seriously rethinking my social habits.

Suck It Up, Buttercup (A rant that will probably offend someone)

There's a sickness running rampant and it's driving me crazy. It's pretty contagious, highly destructive, and honestly? Super annoying. The world is sick with self-pity, and riddled with "motivational/moving" campaigns whose mission statements are to inspire self-worth but really they just allow the sickness to fester. They give platforms for people to force their problems and issues on the general populace as part of an insecure search for validation. They make short documentaries with soft music in the background where people speak slowly and use vague statements pretending they're solving a problem, while really just accelerating the free-fall into a whirlpool of self-pity.  They start blogs where they can vent about (and therefore justify) their unhealthy situation.

 Now, I'm all for writing about or talking about something in order to get it out of your system, figure it out, and move on. But there's a difference between getting something out and becoming focused and obsessed with it. The former is healthy, the latter only blows it out of proportion to the point where you can't see anything other than your problem and you become lost in it. Drowning in a sea of self-pity that you willingly jumped into and don't really want to get out of. Self pity is like a drug. In small doses it can help the pain, but when you abuse it it becomes addicting and begins to control you.

When we indulge our minds and emotions in obsessing over the negative, we become deluded, thinking we are doing something that will change our situation, when really we are mentally creating a pocket of justified complacency where we convince ourselves that because others are going through the same thing, the thing itself is okay. We become unable to solve the problem when we make living in it comfortable and bearable.

When we focus on simply surviving a challenge instead of conquering it, we forget to find a solution and therefore render ourselves incapable of truly overcoming anything because we're too busy whining about why our life is so hard. Our obsession with pitying ourselves is making us immature, self-centered and weak.

I don't know if any of this is making sense. Let's start over.

I once went on a few dates with a guy who would say things like this:

"Having been through more than most people...[insert unrelated claim here]"
or
"Because my life has been so much harder than most..."
or even worse
"People can't understand me because they haven't suffered as much as I have."

And because punching your date is frowned upon in most cultures, I would just cringe inside and change the subject without commenting on his self-righteous attitude.

I mean, honestly. How prideful are we to think that because we have been through something hard we are entitled to say that ours is a harder life than others? Why would our struggles make us better than anyone else? I don't want to imply that your personal issues are insignificant in any way. I just want to point out that no matter how hard we think our life is, there is always someone who has it worse. So we should just be glad that we are not them, and work on conquering our own challenges.

If you are sitting there on your computer in a warm building with clothes on your back and a functioning body feeling like your life just couldn't get any worse, you need to get over yourself. There are people right now who don't know if they will live to see the sunrise again.  Children in Africa kidnapped and forced to be soldiers. Impoverished families who have never known how it feels to have a full belly. Prisoners of War who are being tortured. And the list goes on.

So yes, I am sorry that you're not married though you desperately want to be, or that you can't afford the new iPhone, or that you feel lonely sometimes, that you don't like the way the country is being run or that your life isn't going exactly the way you want it to. But honestly? Join the club. If everyone's life was perfect we would all be stupid, naive, and weak.

 I don't mean to come off as insensitive, because I do understand that sometimes life just sucks. And you are perfectly entitled to feel sorry for yourself every now and then. But when you become addicted to the self-pity, when you love the extreme emotional state that comes with indulging your sorrows, you become weak. You become unable to grow. So we all need to stop wallowing in our own struggles and start losing ourselves in serving others. Because only then will we be able to climb out of whatever pit we have found ourselves in.  In the end, the world keeps turning despite our current crises, and the best we can do is accept that and move on.

Plus, without our trials we would never become better. We would never grow. We would never change our perspective, we would never learn. We would be stagnant.

Michelangelo said, "Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it."


We are the blocks of stone, and God is our sculptor. No block of stone can become a beautiful sculpture without being struck, and struck hard, by a chisel and a hammer. Without losing those parts of ourselves that are concealing our inner beauty and potential, we would only be, at best, a block of stone. Our trials are nothing more than God telling us He knows we have more potential and can become better, stronger and more beautiful than we are now. All we need to know is that in the end, everything is for our own good.

 So let's all stop wallowing in our self-pity. Stop secretly loving to play the victim. Instead of "Why me?" let's start asking ourselves"Why not me?" Let's all remember that we are stronger than whatever we're going through. You have problems? So do I. So does the rest of the world. Suck it up, stop whining and start conquering it already.