the three week rule.

have you ever noticed that the best time of any blocked, extended period of time is the last three weeks? i mean, there are good things the whole way through, and maybe it is just me because i am some psycho pessimistic, ungrateful, not fun person, but seriously, it is always the last three weeks of anything where life all of the sudden becomes absolutely wonderful, and you feel nostalgic for everything you have done. i think it's because the end is finally in sight. at a month, it's still far away. you can't see the last day in your mind's eye calendar. but, at three weeks, you can see the weeks panning out, you can see that last monday, those three tuesdays, and you remember how quickly the last three fridays have passed by. it is when your brain finally is able to see clearly exactly how much you love everything, how much you are loving your life, and while you enjoyed it before, and maybe at the beginning you couldn't fully appreciate it because the end was out of sight, but when there is three weeks, you are fully aware. and social barriers come down, and everyone talks to everyone, and all is forgotten of earlier drama, and for some reason it doesn't really matter what you say when you're talking to people, because everyone is just really happy and they all can see that the end is in sight as well.

the last three weeks of anything is the best part of life. something happens somewhere between the beginning of something, and the last three weeks, and it is really great. and at the risk of sounding incredibly cheesy, it's just really beautiful. I'm trying to figure out how to make that beautiful time come earlier. any suggestions?

examples from my own life.

high school:

when awkwardness and worrying about who your friends are, the people you want to be friends with and the best approach to being their friend, how to avoid the people you want to avoid, and every other stress just melts into this:

freshman year beginning (pretty cute, whatever, but...for my limited vocabulary...stiff):

and end:



at liberty square beginning:



and end:

in england:

where we were all trying so hard to have the time of our lives, and we knew that we should be best friends, or at least we would be, so we took pictures like this:

and jumped into freaking freezing lakes together to prove how epic we were, how we were having the time of our lives. and we did it when I couldn't yet distinguish some of these people in the dark. (which i think i could do by the end.)

and then with less than three weeks left, these kind of pictures were real and fun and great:

and Paris.

beginning:
where we sort of knew each other. at least enough to take dumb pictures.

and now, when it is not a decision as to whether or not we make faces like this.

i am almost crying because three weeks is here. it is always the happiest/most depressing/most fun/most pre-nostalgic/the part you remember the most because it was so wonderful.

i know some of you have superb social skills, so this probably doesn't even apply to you, so i hope you don't think i am a horrible person. i am trying to work on it. we'll see.

happy last three weeks of fall semester!

meet my wife.

Ericka and I have been married by proxy ever since freshman year of BYU when Ericka was afraid that I would get married like those stories I would tell her about eighteen-year-olds getting married at BYU, (like there was anything to be scared of.) but we fell in love way before that.

senior prom

We decided to spend our honeymoon in Paris (she's on study abroad through Stanford), and here we are. Today we went on our first date in a long time. I hope you aren't getting creeped out by this extended metaphor...I'll change. Ericka and I are actually the same person. Emicka Erily. (It's weird that I have to explain to you that Ericka was my best friend in high school, and just hope that you know everything that goes along with that. You can just project all of your wonderful feelings about your friends from high school on to our relationship, and you know, it's something like that.)

Today I met her at the Louvre, and she came to my art history class and listened to the lecture, and we actually did a good job of listening to the lecture, and inserting conversation into appropriate walking times, or appropriately boring intervals. It was a very strange but of course wonderful collision of worlds...




After class we went here:




thick and rich hot chocolate, lingering for a pleasant amount of time, talking of high school, and roommates, and old friends, and parents, and sisters, and Paris, and the flat we will buy here, and determining possible ways of becoming incredibly rich. In one of my old journals, and I read a passage I had written about Ericka during my sophomore year of high school, when I began to be friends with Ericka. I said something about how her determination and drive for life matches the intense color of her hair. I have since decided that her motivation and focus far surpass the dramatic color of her hair. Just look at the way she pours and drinks her hot chocolate:




this people, is why she will go far. and why I blog. don't think about it. just look at that interior...yum.

We like drinking things together:



But mostly it was so nice to see my wife again, as our lives have just seemed to expand until the parts where we overlap are shoved to the outsides. But we live in Paris now, and we live closer to each other than we ever have in our entire lives. And even though it can't really not go back to more than living a few states away, and occasional phone calls and seeing each other at christmas and summer, today we walked around in the Louvre, and I told her about going to Place des Vosges and almost crying because it was so beautiful, and she just said, "oh Emma" in such an understanding-of-me way, and we talked about our forthcoming run in the Jardin des Plantes on Friday.