Man Lunch

I like food. In fact… I depend on it. It keeps me alive. On top of that, I like good food and large quantities of it. Most things that you would expect a stereotypical college guy to eat don’t do it for me. I like frozen burritos, ramen, nachos, and all the other things I should be eating to destroy my health, but none of those things ever fill me up or satisfy me. And if I go too long only eating those, then I start to get depressed. So I generally like to cook decent meals for my self. I have become a semi decent cook actually.

So my roommate David and I have started a tradition. On Sundays after church we have started to have a “Man Lunch.” And it has turned out to be, as David would put it, “not even a bad idea.” Basically we periodically have a wonderful steak meal, grilled on the barbeque. David takes care of the grilling while I cook up all the other stuff. Today we had some fresh asparagus to go with the steak and mashed potatoes. To be honest I’ve never cooked asparagus before. But it’s no different than any other vegetables. So I sautéed some onions and threw a bit of garlic in there. Then threw the asparagus in, and as a last minute brilliant idea, my roommate had some lemons. So we put in some fresh squeezed lemon juice. It gave it a wonderfully tasteful zing. Anything that can be described with the word “zing” has got to be good. Basically man lunches make both of us instantly giddy and happy. The steaks have been very high quality lately too. I don’t know if I just got lucky with the cut, or David’s grilling skills have greatly improved, either way I’m certainly not complaining. It leaves both of us happily satisfied in a blissful daze for hours afterwards.

The life of Bryan

Well not much has really changed. Last time I wrote about what my life is like it went about like this. Frisbee, work, nerdy econ stuff, and… well… that’s about it. So now that summer has started my life consists of: Frisbee, work, nerdy econ stuff, and… a little soccer. Intramural season is underway. I’m on a Frisbee team with some people from the BYU team and on my ward soccer team. I also had the option of joining the softball and kickball teams, but since I also have normal BYU Frisbee practice twice a week as well as Frisbee games every Thursday for the Orem City Frisbee League, I figured it might be a good idea to take it a little easy.

So the run down on all the sports teams. Our Orem City league turned out to be a fairly solid team. They try to even the talent out between all the teams, but it is really hard to do that sometimes. The people assigning teams are on the BYU Frisbee team so they know most people who play competitively around here. Then you get a lot of people that they don’t know. You are supposed to rate yourself, but self ratings are extremely subjective, especially since it is hard to compare yourself when you don’t know what other people are rating. For example, I think I barely made it into the top 50 in rankings. I probably am really somewhere in the top 25 skills wise, but it’s just hard to rank yourself. For me it was fine because the people know me so they can put me where they need, but for others they have no idea. Well it turns out that a number of the unknown people who were assigned to my team are from BYU-Idaho and have played semi-competitively there. So we have a solid team. We are undefeated so far, but we have only played two games.

BYU Intramurals is going well. We put together an upper division team. It is a team of mostly mid range players from the BYU team. We don’t have any “handlers” but we all are competent enough to play at an intramural level. It turns out that we run an extremely smooth offense. It works and flows really well. The only problem is that we often drop easy catches. It is silly. But that’s what happens. We’ll see how the rest of the season turns out.

The BYU Ultimate team is going well. We changed our name to “Destroying Angels” a little while back and got new jerseys. The jerseys are very nice and are made of wicking fabric. We have a tournament coming up in June. It is actually the Utah Olympic Games. They added Ultimate to their list of events last year. It is one of the few 2 day tournaments that we actually get to play on both days (Usually the 2nd day is on Sunday so we skip out on those games). I’m looking forward to that. Hopefully we can take it all again.

Now for soccer, this is the first time in 3 or 4 semesters that I’m not playing goalie. I like goalie, but it’s fun to run around as well. I usually play defense or mid. I prefer mid. I like to be able to run on both sides of the field. There is a lot more running, which is good for me.

So that’s the run down on my sports life.

Maybe we are morally detached

So every once in a while I come across something that I find quite amusing. However, when I show it to someone else they find it less amusing. I have had reactions from disgust to thinking it is some sort of social heresy I came across a blog entry that one of my former professors happened to write on Times and Seasons. Now before you go and freak out, I think he does raise some interesting points, and it does have some societal implications that add a very logical side to the debate about abortion. So here’s the link. It turns out that using this kind of analysis we are definitely not at the socially optimal level of abortions, even when you throw morals out the window it still comes up that way. So anyways, one of the reactions I got to this article when I shared it was “Sick! He's putting a value to a fetus!" My thoughts were... well yeah. Maybe I'm just morally twisted and detached like all other economists. Or maybe I just make a difference between measuring a monetary value that a life has to an economy vs. what real value is. I don't know if that made sense, but I'm going to stick with it. We can debate that further if you so desire.

For any other social scientists/economists out there, he also wrote this article which I found amusing. Just do yourself a favor and don’t take things so seriously.