This is a piece of trash that I found from the Salt Lake City Abercrombie & Fitch before it closed down forever in  early 2019. It was just some marketing that they had up on the shelves, but I found it beautiful, and as they started to dismantle the whole store, I took this piece for myself as a memento. It's beautiful. Trash, maybe, in some people's eyes, but one day they will come around and see that I was right and that it was beautiful, just like with everything else.

I promised myself I would start posting again when I got a computer, so this post is long overdue. Plus, this blog finally shows up near the top of the page when you Google my name, which was what I intended when I first made this website three years ago. Now that I have an awesome new Mac, it's time to post an update of my life. 

So, what is my life like right now? I'm a grad student at Syracuse's online program for a master's degree in library science. During college, at BYU, getting a job as a student librarian was something that kind of got my life organized and worked really well. I spent most of my last two years there working as a reference librarian. I'm thinking that becoming a librarian at this stage of my life will have the same effect as it did during college. It's just a nice, solid career that is an undebatable fit for my personality and my talents, and I think it will be a good fit as a long-lasting career choice. I enjoy my classes, and I've enjoyed getting to spend some time shadowing one of the UVU librarians this semester. I could actually end up using my art history degree as a librarian. Right now, I'm working on a fifty page portfolio project describing how a librarian would help an art history student research Iraqi contemporary art. Taking contemporary art was a great experience at BYU--I had written my term paper back then on some of the art that is featured in the Salt Lake City airport. I'm on track with Syracuse to finish around Labor Day 2021.

I'm working for Goldman Sachs in the CIMD department, which stands for Consumer and Investment Management Division. It's not quite IBD, which is what I was shooting for and hoping for when I was at Georgetown, but it's still a great division within a great company. I help out with Marcus, which is GS' relatively new consumer banking program. My title is specialist, which is even lower than analyst right now. It's all service, no sales, so I don't have quite as much pressure on me as I did when I was at Wells Fargo. One option that I have is to stay with Goldman for a long time and just keep progressing within the company. Maybe my library science degree would just be something to say that I have. I took a survey once that asked what my highest level of education was, and I wished so badly that I could put master's degree, just to say that I had one. Or maybe I could transition to becoming some kind of business librarian after spending many years at Goldman. The second option I have is to just get a librarian job right away and to treat Goldman Sachs as something that I'm just doing to put food on the table while I get through school. I'm not even close to making a decision on that yet. Hmm, I just did a Google search and found that there are actually Goldman Sachs librarians, like corporate librarians. I'll have to do some networking eventually because that could be a good avenue for me.

If you're looking through my blog, I guess you're going to scroll down and search around a bit and see my entries from 2017-2019 describing the whole odyssey of my time at Georgetown. I enrolled in a Master of Science in Finance program there. I got straight A's my first year and became the class president. I got a 710 on the GMAT, which is 91st percentile. I did very well there for a while, and I enjoyed life and my experience of it. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to graduate. It was a big crash that caused me a lot of distress in my life, and I feel like I have since regained almost all the weight that I lost during those years. But I'm going to lose the weight again, and I'm back in graduate school trying again.

I'm currently reading William F. Buckley's autobiography, Miles Go By. I'm rooting for Pete Buttigieg in the Democratic primary, and sometimes I wonder if I should switch parties. I don't know yet if I'm voting for Buttigieg or Trump. I enjoy watching Smallville and The New Pope on Hulu, and I can't wait for Elite season 3 to come out on Netflix in March. My favorite Billie Eilish songs are Bury A Friend and When The Party's Over. 

I stopped going to church in November. There was a Gospel Doctrine lesson about the book of Hebrews and how Judaism is fulfilled in the life and mission of Jesus. I realized that I didn't believe that Judaism has been fulfilled in Jesus and that no matter how much I found cultural comfort in Mormonism, there really was a change in my heart and in the way I see the world that happened when I received my mikveh and my bais din. Talking to a Jewish guy I met on Tinder is my main practice of Judaism right now, haha, but I want to make teshuvah in a deeper way with time. I feel awkward going back to Temple Har Shalom or Congregation Kol Ami, and those are pretty much the only two shuls in Utah besides Chabad, so I think my formal reconnection with a synagogue will happen when I move to another state in a year or two. I'm not really into doing mitzvot right now, but I think I can at least set a goal of reading Eichmann Interrogated and a couple of novels by Philip Roth over the next year or so.

My rule, when I first started this blog, was to try and put a picture of me with every post. This is a pic of me with Congressman John Curtis, from September, to keep up the pattern. I briefly interned for the Congressman in Provo this fall, although I had to terminate the internship and start working again. I've gained weight, unfortunately, and it shows in the picture. I'm also including a photo of myself from one year prior to that, doing a headstand and showing off my CrossFit. I gained a lot of weight out of sadness over the end of Georgetown, and the difference between the two pictures reflects that. I'm back in CrossFit now, and back on the paleo diet, and hopefully I'll get back to looking the way I did at my prime again. My body is really weird right now. I think a body looks worse if it had previously been in shape and gains weight than it would have looked if it had always been heavy from the get-go.