This is my first truly free Saturday since May or June. Been working so hard for the past several months. It feels really, really good to relax and stay in bed a bit. It's the kind of morning when, in my old habits, I would have made a giant batch of pancakes. I don't really eat pancakes anymore because of all the sugar in syrup, but I plan to find other health-compatible ways to treat myself.

I have an accounting midterm tomorrow that is worth 25% of my grade. I feel pretty confident, actually, and am not really worried at all. I would really like to graduate from Georgetown with straight A's, and so far I'm doing a great job on that path.
 
Yesterday at CrossFit was kind of a milestone for me in terms of intensity and ambition of the workout. We did a WOD called Andy in honor of Veterans' Day. While wearing a 20 lb vest, 25 thrusters, 50 box jumps, 75 deadlifts, run 1.5 miles, 75 deadlifts, 50 box jumps, 25 thrusters. I love this sport and love the way it strengthens my mind and my body. That 1.5 mile run during the middle was almost Zen-like in terms of peace and mindfulness.

It looks like I may take my CFA and my DELF exam in Paris next June. It depends how finances work out, but I think that's where I'm leaning.

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Wrapping up a great week in Washington DC with my Georgetown classmates and friends. I'm perpetually amazed at how much of a good fit this Georgetown program was for me. A lot of my classmates were deciding between the Johns Hopkins program and here, including myself, and while I respect Hopkins a lot, I'm really glad I ended up here and met these special people in particular.

The core of the week was the business case study competition, which we spent most of each day working on. We played the role of consultants, advising a major fund about the performance of its investments. We had to think about not only about the mechanics of how financial investments work but also about the strategy of how one investment business keeps up with another in terms of AUM--assets under management and how many people with investable money are actually choosing to come to you. My group had some really good synergy. I was really proud of us. We divided tasks out really well and played to our strengths while acknowledging our weaknesses. We in the end finished third place out of sixteen groups in the compeition, which actually did not surprise me. I may write more later about what I learned in this group work about principles of successful synergy and work flow, but I have to pack for my flight soon.

A personal project of mine was to wake up early in the morning (usually about 4 or 5 am) to go to the Bloomberg terminal in the MBA room and finish the 8 hour Bloomberg terminal certification course. I'm really glad I did it; never learning how to use Bloomberg was one of my biggest regrets about BYU, although I did graduate with a business minor in the end. I will say that: BYU's nonprofit management minor pretty much gave me all the key components of an undergraduate business school experience, without conveying any of the actual prestige of having a full business degree. I'm able to hold my own in this master's program, partly because of what I learned at the BYU Marriott School of Business. I remember in particular the day I learned how to pull up a company's annual reports and financial statements on the internet and dig through it to pull out key, relevant data. I remember pulling up Abercrombie's financials, and being like, "woah, I'm a businesss student!" At Georgetown, my group's use of the hedge fund's annual reports and letters to its shareholders was one of the things the judges found most impressive.

I do want to briefly say some kind words about my two closest friends in the program, Ryan and Amelia, pictured below with me. While I feel really happy that I've developed a reasonable diversity of friendships with the 80-some people in the program, these are the two people that I especially click with the most. Ryan is a really smart guy from Boston who at the moment is very passionate about cryptocurrency. Sometimes he posts articles about bitcoin and ethereum and I actually open them and read the whole thing but come out none the wiser, haha. But the parts that I do understand let me see that he is an extremely talented, motivated individual who rides the wave of innovation very well and is going places some day. Amelia is an equally smart gal from Florida. She works in mid-level management for a major US corporation and seems really talented at what she does. She gets to travel a lot for her job and I think this is her second masters degree. I learn so much from her diversity of experiences and from her drive and ambition. Her group actually won the case study competition, first place, a fact of which honestly I am not surprised.

As I prepare to fly out and return back to Utah, I feel inspired to continue working on getting better and chasing a better life. But I also feel proud of the changes and improvements I have made already. Hoya saxa! Cheers for good things to come.​

Today was the last day of my Georgetown orientation weekend. I'm officially a graduate student! Orientation was a really positive experience. I have great classmates, great professors, and great career services counseling resources. I have a lot of options in front of me for where and what I want to be in life. I hope that I can behave and make choices in a way that will not be selling myself short. I don't think I was honestly "ready" for Parsons two summers ago, but I do feel ready for Georgetown. Let's go; let's do it; allons-y.

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Checking in. Okay, so I've been 26 for two weeks. This feels surprisingly easy. I think 26 will be a better year than 25 was. I have a new manager at the bank, and she's really awesome. We seem to have really similar personalities, and we click and get along super well. She was the manager of Wells Fargo at BYU Bookstore around the time that I was there, though I never had any significant problems or incidents that would merit me actually going in to speak to the manager. She has also been paleo in the past, but no longer is now.

The new manager is really excited and on board about the idea of making me a licensed banker. They're saying I'll be able to go for the licensing tests either in October or in January. It would be October for certain, but it's just that I do have to leave to Washington DC for a week in October for Georgetown classes, and that may or may not interfere with my ability to participate in the program. We'll see. What they're saying right now is that if I don't do the October class, I will almost certainly participate in the January class, so I am very excited about that.

Speaking of Georgetown, whew--Georgetown! Class begins in a week, or now, depending how you count. We have a bunch of orientation things that started this week, and then true curriculum classes in arnest will start in the middle of August. I'm really excited to fulfill some of my potential and learn more about the world of finance. I know I'm going to be exposed to a lot of aspects and sectors of the finance world. I am pretty sure that I want to continue down in the world of banking and be a higher-up banker, but who knows, maybe how I feel in two years will be different.

On top of school, I would really like to set a goal for myself to complete my CFA and my DELF/ DALF certifications. They just announced that there will be these super cheap flights from Denver to Paris next summer, so I'm kind of thinking of planning a summer vacation to Paris and just taking my DALF exam there. It would only be one week, because that's all Wells Fargo allows at one time, but yeah I would take off a week around my birthday and go explore Paris for the first time. 

I've been going to CrossFit consistently 4x per week for about a full month. It's developing my body well, and I do have actual abs that I can touch, feel, and see for the first time in my life. I hope that I can keep this habit up when school starts.

I'm going to see if I can try to clean up my bedroom just a little bit before work starts.

I'm grateful for my two amazing jobs--Wells Fargo and Polo Ralph Lauren.

Wells Fargo feels almost most like a passion or a hobby at times than like a job. I love going there to stretch my mind, exercise compassion for individuals and families, and learn more about finance every single day.

Polo Ralph Lauren is where I go to earn money to pay for Georgetown. It's cool to be able to pay for tution while interacting with fun, motivated people like Hunter and Marshall. It's also cool to have managers who understand how important school is to me and who are willing to give me as many hours as I need this summer, so I can keep up to pace with my saving goals.

I ought to go to bed now though. Talk to you later.

This is an article about the paleo diet, which is one of the most important principles in my life right now.

I decided to become paleo about one year ago, during summer '16, right before my 25th birthday. It's something that has really changed my life. I have not weighed myself in months, but I know that I have lost about four pant sizes in terms of my waist getting that much smaller. I know that, even without attending CrossFit very consistently, I am very proud of how my body and my abs are looking. I'd like to try and explain and uncover why paleo dieting is so important to me.

The essence of paleo, as I understand it, is to eat in a way that makes logical sense for our bodies. If you were to go into a field and try to grab some grain growing in the field and eat it just like that, the barbs on the exterior skin of the grain would hurt your body and attack your stomach and irritate your insides. Nature designs those grain-barbs as a natural protection for the growing plant, so animals won't come and eat it. The logic of paleo says that if grain is so bad for you in a natural state like that, then it probably is also bad for you in any form, no matter what kind of processing and cooking you do to it to put it in an edible form.

So paleo dieters are avoiding grain, avoiding processed food, and avoiding things that are generally bad for the body. I remember when my CrossFit coach first explained paleo to me. He was like, "Avoid processed food." And I was like, "Isn't cooking a process?" 

It's funny becuase in a way that's true. Cooking is a process, especially when you do things like add a lot of excess sugar to food or extract sugar from the fiber in fruit or things like that. I guess paleo is not this absolutely ideological pure return to nature and eating food purely as it is found in nature. If you want and are into that kind of thing, there are blogs on the internet about how to be paleo in terms of making your own shampoo or soap or toothpaste from natural materials instead of buying it from the store, but that's not an extreme that I am ready to go to--not now or not probably ever. I take pleasure most especially in avoiding grain and avoiding added sugar, the two main nutritional culprits that I feel contribute to the epidemic of American obesity.

Something that I feel is cool about paleo and that I feel is only stated implicitly, but never explicitly, on paleo blogs, is that from the standpoint of this paradigm, not only are a lot of people overweight, but even people who have what you would call a normal or healthy weight are still also visibly suffering from the effects of grain-induced inflammation. It's like if you were to eat something that was outright spoiled or poisonous, your face and your body would obviously swell up and stuff right, as your bod tries to fight off the toxins. Well that is what grain and sugar do to you on a minor level. Think about it: when you look at people who are really, really athletic and fit with low body fat, their faces are super chiseled. The rest of us are on a gradient of different levels of inflammation compared to that. 

I feel like being paleo successfully is probably my biggest success of the past year. That, or getting into Georgetown and passing the GMAT. I've heard it said that ninety percent or more of diets fail. I guess I've gotten really lucky that I have found a diet that works for me, then. A diet that makes so much sense. Something I take a lot of pleasure in right now is cooking recipes out of the cookbook "Paleo Takeout." I don't recommend this book for beginners but only for intermediate or advanced level paleo people. The author is kind of a non-traditional, cavalier paleo guy. He eats rice, etc. So you will want to get a feel for the diet yourself first and know what your personal boundaries and non-negotiable limits are as far as what you will and will not eat. Then you can go forward and interpret what he says as you will.