Of all the buildings on campus, the JFSB (Joseph F. Smith Building) is the one I feel most at home in. It's a relatively young building. When I was a junior in high school in 2006, I came down to BYU in the spring for the French language fair. I think it was brand new then, because in 2005 the fair had been in the McKay building. (At least I think that's where it was--I haven't been in the McKay building enough to know for sure.) The JFSB is a pretty building. It has outdoor gardens on every floor but the basement. There are lots of windows and a giant courtyard. The walls of the courtyard are made of travertine.
The JFSB is the home of the College of the Humanities and its departments, including Linguistics and English Language (my major). The basement is full of classrooms, and I usually have at least one class down there. (There is no phone reception down there. Most of the upper floors are just offices. It makes me kind of sad that the place with the most traffic and most use is the basement.)
Since I spend so much time there, it's difficult to fathom not being familiar with it. But I think the geology folks aren't too familiar with it. This week for Historical Geology we had a field trip to the Museum of Paleontology. I think that's one of the most underappreciated buildings on campus; many people don't even know it's there. Which is a shame, because fossils are awesome. Unfortunately, it's not very big, even though we're a major university. The College of Eastern Utah (now part of USU) has a bigger and better museum, even though it's a small-town college. Anyway, when we got done, I asked one of my classmates if he could give me a ride, since I wouldn't be able to make it back to campus in time for class. I told him I needed to go to the JFSB. He had to ask, "Is that the glass one?" He knew which one it was, but he had to confirm it, whereas someone in my major would know immediately which one it is. I think it's kind of funny he would have to ask, since the JFSB is directly northwest of the Eyring Science Center, which is where most of the geology stuff goes on.
So it was kind of funny this week when I attended a lecture for extra credit for my Geology of Planets class (I could count it for Historical instead). The lecture was in the basement of the JFSB. It was weird to go down into the basement, which I am so familiar with, and see all of these geology people, when they don't normally belong there. I asked one of my classmates if he had often been there, since he was a geology major. He said he'd only been there once, for an interview. Of course, he may have been an outlier, since he's new at BYU (and even I didn't have a class in the JFSB until summer 2010, having started winter 2010). The lecture was on climate change. It was pretty interesting. The year 2012 was unusually warm on Earth. There is a bridge in Greenland that was demolished by all the meltwater; the water hadn't been that high since the bridge was built in the 1950s. It drives me absolutely crazy when people put their fingers in their ears and say global warming doesn't exist. You should trust scientists when it comes to science, not Republicans. (Or Democrats for that matter.)
Classes alone make me spend a lot of time in the JFSB, but I especially spend a lot of time there now because BYU Studies, where I work, is on the first floor. I have been there for nearly eleven months now. I'm lucky to work there, and I only applied last year on a whim. It's a really good environment, paid internships are hard to find, and I get to make my own hours. There was once a gospel question that I acquired on my mission, and that question has now been answered from all that time I spent working on writing abstracts for those crazy Hugh Nibley articles. Thankfully I'm now done with Nibley, and I don't think I would ever choose to read him again. But he did answer my question. This summer I'm not taking classes and I'm just going to work. Provo is awesome in the spring and summer, and this summer I won't have to worry about homework. It's going to be great. (I found out this week that I could graduate in December instead of April next year. But I have to decide if I actually want to graduate then or prolong my schooling.)
My first time in the JFSB as a BYU student was one of my first days here three years ago. I went in to change my major from English (since when I registered I didn't know there was an ELang major) to English Language. Boy, am I ever glad I did that. It seems to me that there are two sides of the English major, writing and literature. Writing is very valuable and praiseworthy. But literature? Analyzing literature seems like one of the most pointless things ever. I think that Shakespeare is saying this because of this and this and this. People actually find that fun?! How do you know what the author is thinking? While English majors are off analyzing the fantasy world of literature, we Linguistics and English Language people are analyzing the real world and how people speak. I also think that English majors are more likely to be prescriptive grammarians than ELang majors. ELang converted me to descriptivism. Prescriptive grammar relates to all those silly arbitrary rules: Don't end a sentence with a preposition, use the nominative form with a copular verb, don't use a double negative. We ELang people care more about how people are actually talking, not how they "should" be. I feel kind of bad about something I did this week. For my Early Modern English class, we are reading Hamlet. Our homework consists of analyzing the play from its language. Apparently we are doing that because EME writers were educated that way. But it feels like literary analysis to me, and in my homework I mentioned that I didn't like literary analysis. I think I made the professor feel bad, because she gave us other options for homework. But she's a very nice lady, and I think she understands.
I also feel bad for another thing I did this week--I had a bunch of pennies sitting on my desk, and I wanted to get rid of them, so I went to the gas station/convenience store across the street and bought a small package of Cadbury Mini Eggs using 50 cents of pennies and some other coins. Usually the gas station has no one else in it (I think South End Market probably took a bunch of their business), and I was the only one there when I started paying, but then some people came in and had to wait. I feel bad I did that to the cashier. At least she got some coins for the register.
I was quite glad it snowed this week. I'm still waiting for a year when I see it snow nine out of twelve months, and I was worried it wouldn't snow this month, so I was glad it did.
But this week I noticed that the giant pile of snow in the JFSB courtyard is finally all melted. The pile had snow from December, and it lasted like three months. But now it's spring and it's gone.
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