The Purple Dinosaur

I'm going to be teaching SPAN 105 at BYU this fall and I'm stoked. However, I realized that I might need some more clothes that look a little more professional for this job. Since I have very little style or fashion sense I recruited Joleen to help me pick out some new clothes.

Our first stop was the Gap. We found a nice yellow shirt for me to wear (don't worry, it looks good) and proceeded to look at some sweaters to wear with it. Some guy working at the store wearing a purple shirt recommended that I try on a purple sweater. I think he was biased. I looked at the sweater he was referring to and it was a shade of purple that you might expect to see on a blanket that your grandma would buy. Being open minded I decided to try it on. I had a surprisingly hard time getting it on and emerged from the dressing room with a crooked sweater on which caused Joleen to erupt with laughter. She helped me straighten it out and to everyone's surprise it looked great! I was the most shocked of all. However, the yellow shirt with the purple sweater made me look like a preppy Huskies fan so I just left the sweater in the dressing room.

Our next stop was American Eagle. A little too trendy for my taste, but if a girl tells you to go into a store, you go. While Joleen was trying some clothes on I decided to try on a purple polo shirt just for laughs. Imagine our surprise when it looked good too! I couldn't believe it. Me, looking good in purple? I briefly considered buying it, but I bought the gray version of it instead for fear of looking "metro" or "light in the loafers."

We ended the evening by going to Jamba Juice where Joleen ordered a drink called the "purple dinosaur." I tried it and it was delicious. I guess I like purple more than I thought.

Nicknames

I had originally planned on writing about all my adventures in Europe, but the task was so daunting that I gave up on blogging altogether. Now it's been six months since I went to Europe and blogging about Europe now would just be silly. So I'll just write about current events in my life instead.

I moved back to Utah in June to attend BYU yet again and it has been exactly as pleasant as I had suspected. I moved in with some random guys that I didn't know and much to my horror one of them is named Ben. What makes matters worse is that we get along and hang out! Having two Bens live together and hang out caused instant problems and confusion.

The other Ben is currently in a movie for which he had to grow a beard. To remedy the confusion caused by us having the same name we decided that he would go by Hairy Ben and I'd be Tall Ben. That's all well and good, but Tall Ben was promptly shortened to TB. This is the normal reaction when my roommates introduce me to people as TB: "TB? Doesn't that stand for tuberculosis?" to which I reply, "Yes, and it means Tall Ben too." I like being called TB.

I have a super awesome teacher from the Dominican Republic whose English isn't perfect. On the first day of class he was struggling trying to pronounce my last name and finally settled on guessing that it was pronounced "Swahili." Since then I've been known in that class as Swahili. One day in class we were discussing one of the many differences between English and Spanish and at the end of the discussion my teacher said, "In the end English and Spanish are both good languages...and Swahili too." It was very endearing.

The girls from the Relief Society in my ward recently had a Relief Society sleepover (a.k.a. gossipfest) at the Bishop's house. I was latter informed that at one point the girls were gossiping about me and decided that my last name reminded them of the song "Shipoopi" from The Music Man and they have now started calling me Shipoopi.

I've never had so many nicknames in my life. So if you randomly see me walking down the street feel free to shout TB, Swahili, or Shipoopi and I'll probably turn my head.