Should You Care About BYUSA?

In short, the answer is probably no. Unless you want to. I won't judge.

A point made clear (now) by the BYUSA and by fellow blog person in this illuminating post, is that they are not a student government (but rather a Student Service Association). What does this mean in as few words as possible? Their power is minimal, their authority is nil. They do hand out free food sometimes, though, so that's something.

So who do you want giving you cookies (as long as you wear a BYU shirt)? Your number of choices has grown. This go around there are three pairs running for the coveted BYUSA President/VP combo. And why shouldn't six people want to pad their resumes with what will inevitably be misinterpreted as serving in some sort of student government? You're just upset that you didn't think of it first. And by first, I mean when you came as a freshman and signed up for their mailing list in order to get a free t-shirt. Maybe you shouldn't have immediately deleted those monthly e-mails.

But they're all about the real issues this go around. Wait, never mind, one of them is still running on the "Vending Machines in the Library" platform. So, like, the security guards will ask me to not bring a Jamba Juice into the library, but they'd be totally cool with buying a chocolate milk inside. In fact, it's completely inappropriate to be eating in about 95% of the library anyway. They also want to improve Wifi across campus. Here's a secret: You could always just contact IT and tell them about a dead spot. Like you can do it right now. If enough students ask, they fix it.

One pair wants to make the BYUSA more effective at pairing you with service opportunities or organizations that you would find interesting. That's cool. Apparently they weren't telling you how to get in touch with the people before. Seems like a simple fix, right? Just give the students the information. But wait, instead of you going in and saying, "Hey, I'm interested in this sort of thing," they'll have you tell them about what your interested in and take a personality test. Yeah, it's the same, but with a personality test. It will also tell you which Lord of the Rings character you're most like.

Surely these candidates are so different that it will be easy to choose one pair that you side with most. Not really. Two sets talk about vending machines, and two talk about the BYUSA being a student involvement center. And surprisingly, I have actually seen all of their initiatives and platforms before. Part of me thinks that they just pull initiatives out of a hat (and with 3 pairs this year, they had to reuse some). No, I get it, they spend a lot of time thinking about these things. Arts cards, pre-game events, vending machines, websites, etc. All are potentially important. If you care.

According to the Universe, "According to current BYUSA President[,] Brandon Beck, 78 percent of the student body did not vote in the last election." What does this mean? Well, it means that 78% of the student body doesn't care about the BYUSA. This could potentially be seen as a massive majority of the student body voting against the BYUSA, but I guarantee that that 78% would feel as apathetic towards eliminating the BYUSA as they are towards electing a new president. To them, all of the candidates are just variations on a theme. And that theme is, "We're so stoked about the BYUSA." And that theme means, "We are happy with the BYUSA as it is."

Can you make it through 4 years without interacting much with the BYUSA? Easily. But then you miss out on cookies and free t-shirts. I have never bought a BYU shirt, and I have like 5. Not a bad deal. So should you care about who gets elected as the BYUSA President/VP? No, because I guarantee the number of cookies, the amount of hot chocolate, and the availability of free t-shirts will remain the same regardless of who gets elected. And if the initiatives you want don't happen, don't worry. They'll be the platforms next year. So during the voting period (March 3-5) feel free to vote or not vote. Your vote probably doesn't actually matter.

An Ideal Relationship

I have spent some significant time pondering this over the past few days, so now I feel it is my duty to present my non-scientific findings to the community.

I think at one point or another, especially at the BYU, many of us have spent some time pondering what would make the perfect relationship. And connected to that is the question of how do we know when we are in a, if not perfect then at least healthy, relationship. The major problem is that oftentimes when you are in a relationship wherein feelings are involved it's just about impossible to objectively evaluate that relationship. Hopefully the following thoughts will at least give us all some tools to use in our interpersonal forward progress.

Let's begin at the beginning. Here are some very key tidbits that serve as a pretty good baseline from my experience.

1) Both parties should be emotionally invested in the relationship. I don't really know if one person can be more or less invested than the other, but I imagine it can happen.
2) Both parties should express their care and affection. Now, we have probably all heard about the different love languages. I'm not sure it matters so much about how your express, but what matters is that you understand how the other expresses affection and how they feel valued and appreciated.
3) Both parties should communicate. Duh. If one or both parties keeps their feelings or thoughts completely closed off from the other, then I can say with some certainty that success is not imminent.

But all of that just sounds pretty standard in identifying a good relationship. In fact, if you are doing well on all three of those then you are probably on the right track. But there is one more thing. I don't think it's anything I've learned, but rather it is something that my experience with theatre has helped me to articulate.

When acting with a scene partner (or partners), if you focus on what you're doing, what you're saying, and your own success in the scene, then the scene will get performed. It will be mediocre and uninspiring, but it will be. What is the secret to a really great performance? Giving. If you think about what you can give to boost everyone around, what you can give to the audience, what you can give at all times, then chances are you are going to have quite an excellent scene on your hands.

I think the same goes for relationships (both romantic and non-romantic). You should be giving of yourself, your time, and your energy to the other person. You should think of their happiness, their success, and their needs. And quite frankly, they should be doing the same thing. There is very little room for selfishness in any relationship you will ever have. I would posit that the only place for selfishness is that you have every right to expect that other person involved in the relationship to be giving, too.

If the other person is extremely giving it is very easy to default to a taking position. They give and give and that giving needs to go somewhere, so you accept it. The problem is that sometimes this default means that you are not giving back. Beware of this. You should both be giving, and you should both be accepting of the emotional "gifts" that the other is giving.

So I said I would tell you how you can know if you are in a healthy and prosperous relationship. That's it. What's wonderful about it is that anyone can learn to give. It's called charity, and it's up to us to tailor that charity to yield the greatest amount of fruit in our relationships. If you feel like you are giving everything and getting nothing in return, then chances are your relationship is not in a good spot.

But here's the thing: all relationships take time and effort. If it's not perfect (because it will never be) you can talk about it. Do you wish that the other person would give more? Then talk to them about it. Any relationship worth having is worth working on, worth developing, worth cultivating. So communicate, give your "gifts," and invest. I promise you it's worth it. You'll never really know where your future will take you, but if both of you think you are on a good path then I say keep climbing.

Feelings: Apparently a Good Thing

Let's talk about our feelings today. How does that make you feel?

Now, if you know me, and I assume (potentially incorrectly) that if you are reading my blog you do, you will recognize that feelings and Matt are not generally two topics that intersect frequently. I have made a long and storied career out of keeping things to myself and carrying on with life. Yes, I have feelings, but I have become very good at not showing or sharing them. If you ask me how I am doing, the answer will probably be that "I'm fine." Hopefully we all recognize this is a Southern Fine, and can cover all feelings from terrible to fantastic. It is used because, quite frankly, you probably don't actually care, you're just being polite. I accept that and embrace it. I think the world could stand for more politeness.

The inevitable consequence of never opening up about my feelings is that quite rapidly the number of people one feels comfortable talking about feelings with decreases to just two people: My inner critic and my mother. My inner critic is rarely super pleasant, and most of the time he just tells me to man up. Valid. He has a point most of the time. My mother is fantastic, and I will be discussing my feelings with her later today.

Now, I could easily take this forum and use it to openly express my feelings, but like I said, I am extremely uncomfortable with that. So instead I will speak in generalities about feelings themselves instead of my personal feelings.

I have worked harder than many to control my feelings. But I will say, and I have learned this recently, that just letting yourself feel deeply is phenomenally liberating. There is something magnificently human about allowing those feelings to wash over and through you. And once they have run their course you are free and clean. 

Maybe it's the world we live in, but for some reason we have developed a culture of selective emotional expression. Everyone has to be happy all the time, or at least act like it. We start building dams, bottlenecking our emotions until they reach unhealthy levels, and then when they start spilling over the walls we have erected we scramble to build the dams higher, stronger, thicker.

The problem with dams is that eventually you are flooding a lot of land behind the dam that you could have been using for something else, like housing, or farming, or sheep grazing (And yes, we are still in the metaphor, but this is also true in real life). Emotional dams are dangerous. However, the far extreme is also dangerous, that of the emotional swamp where we just let certain emotions soak into everything, and we just wallow in them.

I think that the best thing to do is to just feel. If you feel sad, then let yourself feel sad for an appropriate amount of time and then carry on. Trying to smile through everything won't make you a happy person. Trying to laugh off disappointment or defeat won't really bring you joy. But allowing yourself to descend into the valley will also let you climb up the mountain. I don't think God gave us the full spectrum of human emotion and experience so that we could ignore or suppress bits and pieces of it. And let's face the facts; sometimes you just need a good cry.