Star Wars: "Dis-ney"eds a sequel!

I was so happy when I found out Disney bought Lucasfilm yesterday. Best half-birthday present ever.

In all seriousness, I was a bit dismayed when I heard they were going to make a Star Wars VII because for one thing, that's getting a bit high in Roman numerals for me. For another thing, really, Disney? Are we back to the Michael Eisner days of spewing forth cheap sequels? Oh goodness. When I was a teenager, we would get little Disney ads when we bought new movies, listing all the great new sequels coming out and as I flipped through the catalog, I would furiously announce to the void, "Bambi 2? How can anyone make a sequel to Bambi?"

But if anyone could do it, Disney could. And they did. And did. And did. Which is good news for us, actually, because it means that Star Wars VII has a lot of sequel forms to choose from. For your convenience, I will divide them up into major categories.

The vignettes (Think Cinderella 2, Tarzan and Jane, and Belle's Magical World): Sometimes you don't need a whole big plot but rather just a few feel-good stories. If Star Wars VII takes this form, you can expect Han Solo and Leia to fight and make up, C3PO and R2-D2 to make a new robot friend, and a few ewoks to have a celebration. Hopefully they'll outsource any CGI to cheap animators to make it feel more real (I still have the image of Cinderella waddling up the stairs permanently etched in my cranium).

The unnecessary love story (Think Mulan 2, Hunchback of Notre Dame 2, and Pocahontas 2): Not every Disney story ends with a wedding. And that's why you've got to make the sequel! I mean, think about it. Poor Luke gets left out in the cold with only a bunch of Jedi ghosts to keep him company at the end of Return of the Jedi. He out of everyone deserves love, and I think he deserves to marry someone as beautiful as his mom. So this version would focus on him finding love. Somehow. Surely some girl in the universe would have him. I could see us spending 90+ minutes watching him search for love.

Since we already wrecked everything, let's go against canon some more (Think Hunchback of Notre Dame 2 and Pocahontas 2 again): Hunchback of Notre Dame was such a bizarre choice for Disney to start with. They had to completely change Victor Hugo's story to make it family friendly, and even then it still wasn't family friendly (unless you're comfortable with your kids hearing songs about lust). And Pocahontas? I don't think there was a single shred of truth in that movie, except that there was a girl named Pocahontas and a man named John Smith. But the good news is, since they wrecked everything, they could make some sequels! Instead of dying at the end of the first movie, Quasimodo could get a girlfriend. And as for Pocahontas . . . well, they can still pretend to be historically accurate by having her end up with random John Rolfe. I'm not sure how Disney can do the same with Star Wars, but I'm sure someone somewhere has made up a history for post-Return of the Jedi, and they can completely ignore it.

The sidekicks' stories (Think Lion King 1 1/2, Kronk's New Groove, Tinker Bell): Because you can never have enough of Chewie or C3PO or Jar-Jar.

The midquel (Think Tarzan II [different from Tarzan and Jane], Bambi II, The Fox and the Hound II): We can have this midquel set basically anytime between Phantom Menace and Return of the Jedi, so why not learn about Luke's adventures on Tatooine? I bet he had lots of fun with stormtroopers and learned a lot from Ben.

The next generation (Think Lion King II, Little Mermaid II, Peter Pan II, 101 Dalmatians II, and Lady and the Tramp II): What happens when Han Solo and Leia's kid doesn't want to fly spacecraft or be a Jedi? Can he still follow his dreams in a way that can save the galaxy again?

The Christmas edition (Think Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas): Oh wait. George Lucas's wife already did this. Sorry, Disney.

Incidentally, is it just me, or do these songs sound similar? (For the 2nd song, skip to the 1:30 minute mark.)

Aren't you so excited now for Star Wars VII?

A few of my favorite things

I feel like making lists right now, so I decided to combine two lists into one blog post. And since I believe in ending on a happy note, I'm going to start with my current pet peeves.

A few of my not favorite things:

-Facebook statuses about snow. In October. Lots of them. Look, guys, it snows in October in Utah almost every year. Snow in September is something to announce. Snow in late October is not that interesting.

-Single-ply toilet paper. Worst thing ever.

-Postpartum hair loss. I thought I was all done with weird postpartum stuff. Nope. It's suddenly hit with a vengeance the past few weeks. It's like living with a cat . . . with 2 foot long hair. Gross.

-People telling Kevin and me we look like brother and sister. All we have in common is dark hair, dark eyes, and the same height. I'm a lot fairer than him (read: pale as death), we have different face shapes, different noses, different chins, different ears, different smiles . . . if one of us had blond hair then we would never hear this, I'm pretty sure. (And why does this bug us? Probably because we do know how we are related.)

I just don't see it.

Well, that's enough griping. Now onto happier things! Specifically, objects.

A few of my favorite things:

-This pillow. 

Front

Back

 To be honest, every time someone new comes over, I'm afraid they're thinking, "Why did Kyra make a pillow with her wedding announcement on it? How narcissistic can you get?" But that's not it at all. In fact, I didn't even make the pillow. It was a wedding present. From an 80-year-old man. Who made it himself. The pink back makes me cringe a little but it still has stolen its way into our hearts and onto our couch. So when you see it in pictures now you know where it came from.

-This couch. 

When we skyped with Kevin's family I think they were a little appalled at our choice (we reassured them it was cheap). But deep down . . . I kind of like floral prints, okay?

-This train.

We don't even have it anymore, so the fact that I remember it shows how much I like it. Kevin made it for his History of Creativity class and we had it on a shelf until we moved (we couldn't justify moving a piece of junk across the country). Luckily, my dad has it stored in his office, so it still exists somewhere other than our hearts.

-This napkin holder.

I'm surprised it's lasted this long, given that our first ceramic napkin holder lasted less than six months. If it survives however many kids we'll have, it'll be a miracle.

-This mug.

 If you future mothers are ever debating between giving birth in a hospital or elsewhere, pick the hospital. You'll get a mug like this. And its corresponding straw of awesomeness. I remember looking forward to having a mug like this way back when my mom was giving birth to my youngest siblings. And now here I am with one of my own. It's great.
-Our back door.

So we used to live along 700 North in Provo, which can get kind of loud. I was looking forward to moving to a more secluded spot once we got to Michigan. But as it turned out, our windows still opened to a somewhat loud road. But now that we don't have our windows open at night, I've found a great advantage to living in view of a road -- it keeps Joseph occupied. Now I can set Joseph in his swing to watch cars and pedestrians through the fence, and it keeps him happy long enough for me to, say, peel the potatoes. Hooray!

And . . . that's all for now.

Scouting and scheming

I started paying a lot of attention to Christmas newsletters my senior year. I'd toss aside the ones where the kids were too little or too old and instead look at the ones with kids my age.

"So-and-so is hoping to attend BYU in the fall." I would store so-and-so's name in my brain and hope to meet him/her (okay, I cared more about the "him"s . . . I was a teenage girl, after all) in a few months at BYU. By the time school rolled around, I had forgotten most of the names but still thought it would be awesome if I became friends with my parents' friends' kids.

And as a matter of fact, I met at least 3 of them. The first one was my RA Jennae (Rah-jennae, we called her). She was in the RA office the day I moved in. My dad saw her and said out of the blue, "Are you [her mom's name]'s daughter?" She was, and we always enjoyed having the family newsletter connection.

The second connection came my sophomore year. When I was in high school, my dad had had a picnic with some of his high school friends and I got to know their kids that night. So when I recognized Kyle's name in some Facebook group, I think I added him and we ended up being pretty good friends for the rest of that year.

The third connection came at a bridal shower for one of my high school friends who was also at BYU and getting married the week after me. She had invited a girl named Kate and I got to know her a little bit during the bridal shower. Imagine my surprise when 2 weeks later Kate showed up with her parents at my reception!

"I was at home and saw your face on the fridge!" she explained. Turns out her mom was one of my dad's friends from high school and so they had received my wedding announcement. And I think we had actually played together when we were little and had just totally forgotten.

Why do I bring these up? Because I have all these friends having babies and my reaction every time I hear the sex of the baby is either, "Oh! He's going to be Joseph's best friend at college!" or "Oh! She's going to marry Joseph someday!" (But then I have to think, "Well, she's going to be born in December, so she'll be a year behind at school, but with missions, they might meet up . . .") And I'm sure my parents felt the same way  twenty some odd years ago with their friends' kids. Maybe?

Of course, if social networking makes yearly newsletters obsolete, then kids won't have that chance to scout out their future friends the way I did. But a future mother-in-law can still dream. :)

A few songs

This morning, I remembered my magnum opus.

Okay, my real magnum opuses are my marriage to Kevin, my baby Joseph, and my master's degree. But besides those, I have another magnum opus. It's called "Mediocrity."

Kind of ironic, isn't it -- my greatest work is about mediocrity. But it is! It's a song I wrote 4 years ago about feeling mediocre at BYU. And today I remembered it. And I remembered that I wanted other people to know it. A few other people do -- my ward once used it in a little musical they made. (I wish they would have consulted me on things like the tempo or rhythm a bit more, but alas.) I sang it once at Acoustic Explosion. So it's not entirely unknown.

But the thing is, it's never been achieved on the large scale like I wanted. To be done right, it requires at least 4 singers as well as some dancers. It would sound better with a few instruments besides the piano. At the very least, I feel like it deserves to be sung by people who are . . . better singers than me.

Here are the words, at least. I have the sheet music in PDF form but I don't know how to add that to this blog post.

I come from a little town in Texas --

Only pianist in my ward.

I was helpful, I was needed,

At least, I wasn't ignored!

My high school was in East San Francisco --

I stood up, I stood out, was strong!

But here at BYU, I'm not different;

I'm just another Mormon in the throng.

Cuz Mediocrity is my specialty now

I used to be the very best but now I blend in with the rest

No one flocks to me as the special one now

I'd like to be important again, somehow.

They call me AP Harold --

I took 4 tests each May!

But now I'm here at BYU

That's not a lot to say!

Cuz Mediocrity is my specialty now

When all your ward got 4 point oh's I guess that's how it goes.

Please talk to me like I'm special somehow

Cuz I am feeling small and unsure right now.

I did ballet and racquetball,

Piano, tennis, band,

Was student body president

But now can't understand,

If I could be in NHS

And be first-ranked, no less,

With all my high school accolades

Why can't that save my Econ grades?

English and Chem 105

American Heritage, stay alive

Physical Science, Math 113

These classes make me want to scream!

(dance part)

Mediocrity is my specialty now

It stings, it bites, it's really lame to find out we're the same

But though mediocrity is my specialty now,

Someday I know I'll find my place

I'll help the world! You'll know my face!

Cecil, Karl, and Brigham will cheer when they find out what's in store

That mediocrity is not for me anymore!

The end.

So yeah, it needs music with it because the rhythm is a little tricky (some words have to held longer in order for the lines to scan, etc). But yeah. My magnum opus. I'm not ashamed to admit it. I am, however, too shy to demonstrate how it is supposed to sound because that would require me singing. Which is a scary thing to do on the Internet.

Anyway, my dream is that somehow someone somewhere decides to do something with this. Since I never got around to it. Surely there are some BYU students with too much time on their hands, at least in the summer.

Oh, and one other song. I realized this morning that with the changing demographics this other song won't even make sense anymore in a few years, so I ought to share it now. It's called "Freshman Reunion" and it's to the tune of "On top of Spaghetti."

At freshman reunion,

Each girl sports a ring.

You ask, when'd that happen?

Oh, two years last spring.

It started in April

When classes were through.

The girl who'd write weekly

Forgot about you.

The AP was handsome,

And he spoke Chinese.

Her little heart fluttered

When he fell to his knees.

She now has a baby!

And soon will have two.

But you should feel flattered -- 

One's named after you.

This may seem disheartening

But don't waste your time!

Those BYU sophomores

Are now in their prime!

The end. And thus ends my plea for recognition.

The Swing

How do you like to go up in a swing,

Up in the air so blue?

Oh I do think it the pleasantest thing

Ever a child can do!

Up in the air, and over the wall,

Till I can see so wide,

Nichols Arboretum

Rivers and trees and cattle and all

Over the countryside-- 

On the way to a cider mill

North Campus

Till I look down on the garden green,

North Campus

Down on the roof so brown--

Up in the air I go flying again,

Up in the air and down!

-Robert Louis Stevenson, The Swing

How electrical engineering prepared me for motherhood

"You're majoring in math and electrical engineering? What are you going to do with those?" people asked throughout my college career. I would give some vague answer or a "I'm not sure" response. Deep down, all I really wanted to do with my degrees was "raise happy genius children" as I confided to Kevin at the beginning of our email correspondence before we started dating. (Apparently, he didn't mind that much because we started dating soon afterwards.) I often wondered if all my degrees would come to any use.

But the good news is, I have actually found electrical engineering to be quite useful in being a stay-at-home mom. Oh, I can't do things like execute a MATLAB script to do my laundry for me or perform a Fourier transform on Joseph to make him content in the frequency domain (i.e. actually like being in his swing), nor am I any good at fixing electronics (that's not where I specialized), but nevertheless, it has done me some good. Here are some examples:


-Signal processing: Besides being an adorable blob for the first few months, a baby is also an expert signal generator. His tongue, his arms, and eyes are all busy conveying signals. As are his vocal cords. A lot. A way lot. Luckily, with several signal processing courses under my belt, I've been ready to tackle all of the sounds and movements Joseph makes. Those cute high pitched squeals? My internal spectrum analyzer has processed those and determined those are too high to convey actual discomfort. (Really. They are several octaves above actual distress signals.) Those coughing cries? My subconscious has done a short-time Fourier transform and determined those to signal hunger. My success rate? . . . probably the same as any other mom, plus or minus 10%.

-White noise: All the baby books recommended saying "shhhhh" to calm your upset baby. That's what we normally say to people to get them to be quiet. But if you stop to think about it, your baby doesn't know that. You may as well be speaking Sanskrit to your baby to calm him down. What's so special about "shhhh"?

Here's where electrical engineering comes in. You see, sounds like "shhhh" are classified as white noise, like the blizzard that used to show up on TV screens back when cell phones were bricks. It has a flat power spectral density, which means there's nothing really to focus on. Which makes it a calming sound.

(Or you could just believe the "experts" who say that "shhh" sounds like the sounds of the womb, which is why it's soothing. Pshaw. My bet is on the flat power spectral density.)

-Tunneling: So, one required class for the major was Solid State Physics. In this class, we learned about a concept called "tunneling," which according to my textbook is a phenomenon in which a particle can make it across a barrier even though there's zero probability of finding the particle inside the barrier. (Or something like that. Physics people need not bother to correct me.) That is, there is some bizarre way of finding a quantum particle in a spot which classical physics says is impossible.

I've realized that Joseph's pacifier is a quantum object. How did I come to this conclusion? Often when he's falling asleep, he loses his pacifier and cries for us to put it back in. Sometimes we can hunt for several seconds before finding it in some obscure location such as underneath him or way above him. How on earth did it get there? Tunneling. This realization has probably saved my sanity.

-Tackling a problem: Oh, those were the days. The days I'd walk into the testing center after studying for hours and hours and take a look at the test. Look at the first problem. Turn the page to the second. Then the third. Then bite my lip and realize, I have no clue how to do a single problem on this test! Not a one!

But since I took enough of those tests, I came to expect that. I no longer had the panic attacks of freshman year. Rather, I was able to calm down and just approach the problem from whichever angle I could. As my brain turned back on, I would find myself slowly inching my way to the right answer. And luckily, engineering tests always had lots of partial credit.

Well, guess what? There are some days like that. Sometimes your handsome lab partner and husband is there to tackle the problems with you, like Joseph's gargantuan blowout in the temple parking lot or his vomitrocious display the day we were giving our talks. But then there are the days where you're on your own and you have to handle the screaming baby, spit-up, or blowout all on your own. And you don't know where to start. You don't even know if you can move without making the problem worse. That's when you inch your way slowly to the solution, and count on partial credit.

-The real world: In textbooks, things are straightforward. Breadboards work the way they are supposed to. The voltage at one end of the wire is the same as the voltage on the other end. V = IR.  The central limit theorem works. The coefficients you get for your PID controller fall easily from standard equations.

But in labs (and probably even more so in real life), things are not so simple. Sometimes the difference between a functional op-amp and a broken op-amp is if you blow on it. Sometimes random numbers aren't random enough. Sometimes you have to completely change your coefficients for the PID controller by a factor of 10. Real life is a lot more complicated than textbooks suggest.

And the same thing goes for babies, believe it or not. Oh, I did what I could to prepare. I watched this video about how babies cry. (Incidentally, did you know that recognizing babies' cries used to be one of 374 Young Women's requirements to get the reward?) I read all the papers the hospital gave me. I read several baby books including Baby Whisperer and took the quiz to see what kind of baby Joseph was.

And guess what? Even though all that information helped, Joseph was still his own person. Each time I took the Baby Whisperer quiz, Joseph fit into a different category. Sometimes his cries didn't fit the cries described in videos or books, which led me to play a lot of guessing games. Real life is complicated.

-Setting the problem aside: Even for problems that were just on paper rather than hands-on, I still found myself struggling a lot. I would find myself wrapped up in the details of a derivation and get wound around the axle so much that I couldn't think. What was the best thing to do? Just walk away from the problem for a minute.When I came back, I would find that it either fixed itself or I figured out another way to solve it. Likewise, when I just had no clue how to soothe Joseph and was at my wits' end, I would just set him down and walk away until I was ready to try again. Lo and behold, half the time that was what he wanted anyway.

-Enjoying the journey: In both school and parenthood, I've found the daily grind is a lot better endured with a sense of humor. After all, it is kind of funny when you're working on a project way past your normal bedtime or when your baby refuses to sleep and you have to keep going back and forth to console him. Or at least they can be funny if you let them be funny.

And then there are the things that are actually funny. (Maybe they're only funny to me. Oh well.)

I heard Kevin say, "Joseph, sometimes you make it hard to sleep" and I had to come investigate. It's blurry because I was laughing.

Talking about tunneling reminded me of this video from when Joseph was 6 weeks old. We are such helpful parents.

He is so talented.

At any rate, electrical engineering is incredibly useful for future mothers. In its own way.

Laborers in the Vineyard

My first thought when the announcement was made that young women could serve a mission at age 19 instead of age 21 was, "I could have gone."

Over the past few days, I've wondered if I in fact would have gone on a mission at age 19. I never really considered serving a mission because, well, I didn't think I would make it to age 21 without getting married.

But what about age 19? If I had had that to look forward to, perhaps my freshman and sophomore years would have been filled with less boy drama because I would have been a pre-mi. I could have said, "I'm going on a mission. We'll see after that," thus evading the awkward DTRs and flustered feelings which led me sometimes to do homework in the girls bathroom just to avoid dealing with guys. (Girls, don't do that. Nursing mothers need those couches more than you do.)

But then I look back to life when I was 19, and I don't know if I could have dared to go until Leslie's cancer was in remission, and by then another semester would have started and maybe I would have fallen for Kevin to the point that a mission wouldn't have happened at all.

And, as Kevin said, if I had gone on a mission, I wouldn't be done with school yet. That made me shudder. What has also weirded me out is that I'm not even old enough yet under last week's standards to be a sister RM til the end of the month. So if I had gone on a mission, my greatest accomplishments so far -- marriage to Kevin, giving birth to Joseph, my bachelor's and master's degrees -- couldn't have even happened yet. So when all is said and done, with my life where it is right now, I'm glad I didn't serve a mission.

That was the consensus other girls came to when I asked about it on Facebook. Some say they would have gone at that younger age, some say they wouldn't have, but all seemed to be happy that life worked out the way it did.

Anyway, this whole announcement has gotten me thinking about two ideas, both of which are related to Elder Holland's address, The Laborers in the Vineyard. The first idea is that timing matters a lot. I've come to the conclusion that  you are born in a specific year, even a specific month, for a very specific reason. (I wrote a big long tangent about how Joseph's birth affected our lives to prove my point, but I don't want to get too sidetracked right now. Maybe some other time.) There is a reason that the girls born in 1993 and 1994 are getting the chance to serve missions right now. And for those of us who were born earlier -- we can be grateful for the different set of opportunities we got. We can be grateful that we got to labor in the vineyard starting at 9 am rather than at the eleventh hour as in Christ's parable, even if we didn't get to go on a mission. As Elder Holland said last conference,

As the householder in the parable tells them (and I paraphrase only slightly): “My friends, I am not being unfair to you. You agreed on the wage for the day, a good wage. You were very happy to get the work, and I am very happy with the way you served. You are paid in full. Take your pay and enjoy the blessing. As for the others, surely I am free to do what I like with my own money.” Then this piercing question to anyone then or now who needs to hear it: “Why should you be jealous because I choose to be kind?"

The other idea I have gotten from this announcement is about the chance to repent. What of those who would have gone on a mission at age 19 and whose lives are bleaker because they didn't? I frequent a few forums where a lot of inactive members participate. They no longer believe most of the Church's precepts and find themselves at odds with many decisions such as the Church's support of Prop 8, their financial assistance with the City Creek mall, and the perceived gender inequality in the church. Yet they admit they were faithful and valiant especially from ages 16-18 and would have definitely gone on a mission at 19. Isn't it a bit unfair that they were denied (albeit by themselves) this wonderful opportunity that could have bolstered their faith simply because they were born too early?

There's no easy answer to that. But I was recently reading Mosiah 27, about Alma the Younger. He was one who was actively "seeking to destroy the church, and to lead astray the people of the Lord" (v. 10). He wasn't just grumbling on obscure little forums or making snarky comments on every Deseret News article about the Church. He was writing the deceptive "I'm a good Mormon even though I disagree with everything the prophets say" anti-Mormon blogs, making the anti pamphlets, and trying to convince people to leave the church his father loved so much.

And what happened to him? An angel came. He recognized his sins. He turned to Christ and repented. He turned his life around. He became a missionary (and arguably the best prophet in the whole Book of Mormon). He and the repentant sons of Mosiah were persecuted by those who they once agreed with.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you're one who once loved the Church but then fell away, and if Saturday's announcement reminded you of the excitement you once felt, don't be afraid or too proud to come back. The Church needs you, and you need the Church.

As Elder Holland said,

I do not know who in this vast audience today may need to hear the message of forgiveness inherent in this parable, but however late you think you are, however many chances you think you have missed, however many mistakes you feel you have made or talents you think you don’t have, or however far from home and family and God you feel you have traveled, I testify that you have not traveled beyond the reach of divine love. It is not possible for you to sink lower than the infinite light of Christ’s Atonement shines.

Whether you are not yet of our faith or were with us once and have not remained, there is nothing in either case that you have done that cannot be undone. There is no problem which you cannot overcome. There is no dream that in the unfolding of time and eternity cannot yet be realized. Even if you feel you are the lost and last laborer of the eleventh hour, the Lord of the vineyard still stands beckoning. “Come boldly [to] the throne of grace,”³ and fall at the feet of the Holy One of Israel. Come and feast “without money and without price”⁴ at the table of the Lord.

Pictures from July

Okay, you all have heard way too much from me the past few weeks. So it's time for some pictures! These were taken, oh, middle of July? We went up to my aunt and uncle's house for dinner in Alpine one Sunday afternoon and my uncle Mark was nice enough to take these pictures of us while we were there. Joseph was a bit of a grump that whole afternoon (refusing to nurse, not smiling much, acting touchy) so we didn't get very happy pictures. But they're still cute all the same.

I love his face.

Okay. I have to explain this one. I put him on his tummy but on the way down his head hit my knee. So that made him scream. I don't know why I was smiling, but if you look at the later pictures you'll see that I actually did try to comfort him.

This one is funny because he's so stiff and I'm so relaxed.