Here, There, and Everywhere

These are just random thoughts...

• Insurance is interesting. Whenever it comes time to renew my car insurance, it really just feels like it's a blackhole where I toss about a thousand bucks each month and I don't ever actually get any benefit from having it, obviously because I haven't been in any kind of car accidents. But really it's a group thing - 100 people get insurance so that if one of them get into a car accident, they can do so without getting financially destroyed. I'm sure there will come a time when I'm so grateful to have the various forms of insurance, but with my medical, dental, and car insurances I have not used them at all.

  Another thing about health care insurance, did you know that a large percentage of young adult males decline having medical insurance because the cost often outweighs the benefits of having it, meaning that young adult males rarely have large medical expenses. I know universal health care is the thing, but there are actually a good amount of people who don't even need it. I know that may sound crazy to some people, but it's sometimes the case.

• Do you ever just not feel like going to church meetings? It can be sunday school, or firesides, or whatever it may be, but then when you end up going in spite of yourself, those meetings that you want to go to least end up benefiting you the most? I had that last Saturday with a Young Single Adult Conference that we had. It was exactly what I needed and while I had only planned on staying for a portion of the day, I ended up staying from the very beginning until the very end. We didn't have any big-time speakers come in that are common, to say, EFY or General Conference, but the teachers who were present were amazing. It was really great. I was in the perfect place to receive those messages. I'll be writing about that more later this week.

  This ended up being my favorite scriptures (of many) that were talked about during the conference:

  Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered
  by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in
  tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart.

• I went running with a friend last night, and that had been the first time in years that I had gone running with someone. At least 3 years. Normally when I go to the gym/go running, it's by myself. I rarely have music with me, and mostly I don't like talking to people when I go. I just like to do my thing and get lost in my thoughts. So I had kind of forgotten what the experience is like to run or exercise with someone else. I felt really self-conscious - I was trying to regulate my breathing a lot more, I wanted to make sure my pace was even with hers, a lot of things. It was kind of weird, but it is a nice change of pace to be accompanied.

• A couple of language items...Will someone please get me a book on grammar? One thing that I'd like to do is really refine my language skilz. Greg mentioned the other day that "amongst" is not a word, and among should just always be used in its place. His sister-in-law brought that up because her teacher mentioned it, but I'm not sure that's true. It would seem that it's more frequently used in British English than American, but is okay to include. Another I had been wondering about was when to use toward or towards, and it seems that's another British/American English distinction. For the most part Americans will use the shortened version and remove letters/syllables where possible. One exception, anyways. That one is not a word.

• Sometimes I wish I were dating someone. And then other times, like this last week, when I'll hear about relationship problems and realize how sucky it can be. The highs are higher and the lows lower when you're in a relationship, but things are pretty static when you're not. Sometimes static is kind of nice because predictability isn't always that bad.