let’s do this thing.

1. Put Your iTunes on Shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. You must write down the name of the song no matter how silly it sounds!
4. Put any comments in brackets after the song name.

If someone says, “Is this okay?” You say?

“Morning Glory” by Oasis

[sure]

How would you describe yourself?

“The Best of Me” by The Starting Line

What do you like in a guy/girl?

“Nothings Gonna Change My Clothes” by They Might Be Giants

[this made me laugh a lot]

How do you feel today?

“Living Life” by Ben Kweller

[true. true.]

What is your life’s purpose?

“Firestarter” by Jimmy Eat World

[cool?]

What is your motto?

“Saddest Girl Story” by The Starting Line

[yeah, for a good bit of my life, that was true]

What do your friends think of you?

“Smile Like You Mean It” by The Killers

[i guess people think i am disingenuous??]

What do you think of your parents?

“Te Deum Guarani” by Ennio Morricone

[what the…]

What do you think about very often?

“Linger” by The Cranberries

[once again, sadly true for a long time]

What is 2 + 2?

“The Curse of Curve” by Cute Is What We Aim For

[i don’t get how this question could ever make sense]

What do you think of your best friend?

“Over Thinking” by Relient K

[pretty much]

What do you think of the person you like?

“Devotion” by Weezer

[how cute]

What is your life story?

“The End of the Tour” by They Might Be Giants

[huh… kind of depressing…]

What do you want to be when you grow up?

“Suicide Blonde” by Jack’s Mannequin

[bahahahaha, hope not…]

What do you think of when you see the person you like?

“The District Sleeps Tonight” by The Postal Service

[don’t get it]

What will you dance to at your wedding?

“Campfire Kansas” by The Get Up Kids

[i guess that would be fun?]

What will they play at your funeral?

“Bleed American” by Jimmy Eat World

[“i’m not crazy cuz i take the right pills everyday”…. huh]

What is your hobby/interest?

“Teenage Victory Song” by Weezer

[fight!]

What is your biggest fear?

“Ten” by Jimmy Eat World

[if it wasn’t so late i bet i could actually get something out of the song’s lyrics]

What is your biggest secret?

“James K. Polk” by They Might Be Giants

[i have always had a secret love for mid 19th century US politics…]

What do you think of your friends?

“I Put the ‘Metro’ in Metronome” by Cute Is What We Aim For

[possibly ironic]

What will you post this as?

“Drop Out (The So Unknown)” by Jack’s Mannequin

i think things are beginning to wrap up nicely.

part 4

i hate hip hop and rap. i like rock. emo, though totally unhip, speaks to me a lot, since i am usually so sensitive to stuff like girls… i like a wide variety of movies, though stuff that makes the windows shake usually is fun. i like books that make me think. i love east asian food, japanese topping the list.

in high school, i loved to dress nicely. i always shopped at banana republic and j. crew. but then i got poor and grew out of my clothes. i guess i still dress decently, but i do get jealous of rich kids who can afford nice clothes. i was voted as the bessed dress guy in school my senior year of high school.

my celebrity crush during high school was rachel leigh cook. i saw her first in josie and the pussycats. i had a local band write a song about her for me, and i was really close to sending it to her. now, i think my crush is on a korean pop star named lee hyori.

i’ve shot a gun only once. i have no idea what it was. i am not a very macho guy. i know nothing about cars. i like some college football and basketball, but i am hardly a fanatic. i have never gone skiing or snowboarding. i have gone paintballing once. i have played pen and paper role playing games multiple times.

as a kid, i was a total nintendo zealot. i used to get in arguments with kids in school over whether sega or nintendo was cooler. i sort of got out of video games during high school. now i am a mac user, and i like to debate about microsoft vs apple, etc. i am still a geek at heart i suppose.

i don’t like being in wisconsin. i don’t like small towns. i don’t like humid hot weather. i don’t like utah much either. mormon culture is a joke, and it just shrouds the Gospel taught by the church with a bunch of crap. i hate BYUSA and the honor code.

i have horrible eyesight, and i usually wear contacts. i wear 32 waist, 34 length jeans, and it depends on the brand of shirt as to what size it is. i wear size 12 shoes. i am 6'3", and i am around 170 lbs right now (down since the summer…time to get back in the weight room.)

i don’t know exactly what my future goals are just yet. i am pretty sure i will go to graduate school, but i haven’t chosen a career i want to be in. i think it would be nice to be rich, but not snobby. if i was rich, i would not live in a McManshion, and i would give a lot to charity (after buying my wife too much of course). I don’t want to drive a BMW, and definitely no Hummers.

my hair is reddish brown. it was straight up until i was about 14, then it started getting wavy and curly. i like it a bit longer. my eyes were dark brown until about the same time, then they turned more hazel. in some light, they are green, in others, they are brown. i have freckles, and more acne than a 22 year old should. right now, i usually wear Very Sexy Victoria’s Secret cologne. I use Colgate whitening toothpaste.

I have had 3 stitches and no broken bones. I have had 4 cavities and one root canal. one and a half of my teeth are fake. i have spent the night in a hospital once for food poisoning.

the scariest dream i can remember is sitting on my parents bed and lookind down the darkened hallway to the master bath, and seeing red, green, and blue monster heads floating towards me. i used to hate spiders, but now i don’t mind them much. i was also very scared of tornadoes (though i have never seen one) and of people breaking into our house. i used to hate onions and would throw up whenever i ate one, but now i have no problems. i still don’t like raw octopus.

i enjoy camping, but haven’t done enough of it. i went on a sweet week long canoe trip in the boundary waters last summer and loved it. i love hiking too.

i have only been to canada and japan. i really want to go to scotland and ireland.

i can touch my nose to my tongue. and remember in school when they would hand out those pieces of paper with that chemical on it that some people could taste but others couldn’t? it was like a lesson on genetics or whatever. i can taste it.

i have two nieces. the older one is still scared of me.

i have had two dogs, one cat, and a hamster. the dog still alive is named babe, and she is an idiot.

i like to have a clean house, though my room is usually a mess. if i take a girl out on a date, i insist on having a clean car. my dad wouldn’t let me take the nice car for some reason when i took a girl to prom.

i am not attractive nor very charming, and most people think of me as annoying and arrogant. i think the arrogance part comes from my trying to make up for my lack of self confidence and occasional neurosis. i am rarely clever or funny, but try too often.

i tend to be too lazy sometimes (like this past week), and i fear it will be my downfall. i could easily envision myself as an overweight single middle class guy working in a small cubicle someday. not that that is what i want, just i suppose it could happen if i slack too much.

i have had insomnia for about a week now.

i love the card game euchre. i used to play it all the time during school, and i am in love with people not from the midwest who know what it is.

sometimes i wish i could write poetry. sometimes i wish i was better looking. sometimes i wish i was less of a jerk during the times that i don’t really mean to be a jerk, but i come off as one.

i rarely swear, though occasionally under my breath when i am stressed or when i am really upset. i have never been in a fight, though there was a guy that wanted to fight me once. i have been in once car accident. someone rear-ended me. i have been close to dying once, this last summer, when the truck i was in almost went head on into a semi when we swerved to get out of the way of another truck that had lost control and was rolling into the highway. the other truck got smashed by the semi. if we would have been a split second later, we would have been crushed. my girlfriend didn’t seem to care when i told her.

i don’t like chocolate very much. i like fruity candy. i have never had a girl to kiss on new year’s eve. i have given something to two girls on a valentine’s day. i bought a necklace at tiffany & co’s once for a girl.

right now, i wear puma’s. all of my other shoes were lost over the summer. i have a stuffed pig in my room that i won at a fair, and i have a large, three foot wooden fork that my friends and i bought at a thrift store.

i really need to sleep. if you have any questions, go ahead and ask.

part 3

hmm. so, now that you got through the boring stuff…hehe.

i haven’t done a ton of dating in my life, but i’ve hung out with a couple of girls. i wasn’t very popular in high school when it came to dating. i was friends with quite a few girls, but it always just stayed at that. all together, i have had only 3 official girlfriends. my first crush was in 4th grade. i have never had good luck with dances. once, i had a girl tell me the day before the dance that she no longer wanted to go with me (it might have had something to do with me riding around on the cross country float in the homecoming parade with my pants around my ankles, sitting on a toilet). once, i had a girl go to the dance with me, but she wouldn’t slow dance at all. once i had a girl say she would go with me, but then that same day tell me over the internet she was going with “a group of friends.“ and when i took my girlfriend to two different dances, we got in fights at both and i think broke up afterwards both times. also, i can’t dance worth crap. on my mission, i learned a lot about love, so i think i have loved lots of people over the years, but i think i have really LOVED two times. and i have had my heart broken two times. i tend to put my heart too much into relationships, and it usually means i get burned because of it. i am a sucker for dark haired, dark eyed, and dark skinned girls. lately, asian girls (and some latino) seem to fill that bill quite nicely. but, i’m not the most attractive guy in the world, so even if i can charm a girl (haha) into a date with me, it is hard to keep her interested. i am much to emotional and clingy in relationships. and i get jealous easily. i am a very sensitive person, and i rely greatly on touch communication. i don’t have any feelings of superiority to women. for that reason, i try always to be respectful and adoring, unless a girl really hurts my feelings, then sometimes i turn into a jerk (which i always feelreally bad about). if i fall in love with a girl, i am loyal to her to a fault, even if she treats me like trash. if i was rich, i would buy the woman i am in love with probably way to much stuff. my current relationships status is unknown.

i enjoy art, though usually i don’t get it. i am lazy a lot. i have never had alcohol nor smoked tobacco, and i never have been tempted to. politically, i am still figuring myself out, but i am pretty sure i am pretty liberal. i base most of my political ideas off of my religious beliefs as a Christian (yeah, i know, liberal christian..how crazy), because i think that Jesus' teachings were about the individual, not about big corporations. i am religious. i follow the tenets of the LDS religion. i do believe it to be a good and true system. as an intellectual, i have done a decent amount of studying into this church’s history and critics attacks of our beliefs. i have found things that have concerned me and raised questions, but nothing that would compel me to lose my testimony. though hardly a great mormon, i have gained enough and see enough good possibility in keeping my beliefs that i plan to stick with them. i was not a great missionary. i saw only one baptism, and she later went inactive. but i tried to work hard and do my best. sometimes, i hear from a member or a missionary who replaced me, and i get the feeling that i did contribute at least something small to help out God’s children.

part 2

my employment record sucks. my first job was a student computer technician/help desk assitant for the baraboo school district. during the summers, i upgraded computers, set up computer labs, etc. during the school year for one hour of my daily schedule, i would give technical support to teachers throughout the school district. it was a lot of fun, i got paid decently, and i had a desk with a nice chair and an internet connection. unfortunately, it was pretty laid back and relaxed, so i think i am a bit sheltered when it comes to work. i did that for about three years. then i went on my mission. so far, i haven’t tried working during the school year (though i probably will this semester). i was in provo for spring term going to school, and by the time i came back home to wisconsin, all of the good jobs were taken, and no one wanted to hire an unexperienced college student who was leaving in two months. so i did some temp jobs picking up trash, catering banquets, and building fences (a much harder job than i ever thought). i also worked in a popcorn shop on weekends. i still don’t like popcorn much. i applied to become a tutor at the byu math lab, but it looks like they dont have any open positions this semester, so i will have to find something different.

i used to play the trombone. in high school, i was first chair for three years. i was in the symphony band (which was by audition only) for two years. but it was never a passion. so i quit my senior year of high school, and i haven’t touched the thing since. my mom is a piano teacher, but i never learned to play. if i would have started when i was young, i could have a decent singing voice, but now it is nothing worth hearing. i have tried picking up the guitar, but can’t seem to find the motivation to sit down and do it enough.

my father never played sports with me as a child. instead, we played video games. i remember sitting around with classics like legend of zelda, final fantasy, and ultima V. my dad is a computer geek (i so wish he would have stayed in san francisco in the 70s and stuck with his computer hobby instead of moving to wisconsin to become an optometrist…just imagine how rich we would be…), so we have had a computer in the house since i was born. so i have been computer literate for a long time. as a kid, i tried sports, but sucked pretty bad. i was horrible at little league baseball. i remember this one time that i was at bat. we were so young that they just kept pitching it to us until we hit it, and i was up there for like 10 minutes swinging. my coach even came to guide my swing and i couldn’t hit it. baseball wasn’t my thing. i didn’t think sports were at all. by the time i got to middle school, i was one of the least athletic kids out on the playground. i was horrible in physical education. i tried 7th grade football, and for some reason they stuck the skinny little kid on the offensive line. yeah, i got knocked on my back every play. i was tall, so i tried basketball, but again found i was too scrawny to be a big man underneath. my homeroom teacher convinced me to go for the track team, which i tried. i think i did the 400 meter dash, the high jump, and discus. and i thouroughly sucked at all of them. but it got me in good enough shape to so that i ran a 6:34 mile in phy ed class at the end of the year, which earned me an invitation to join the cross country team during the fall. i was a middle runner in 8th grade, but when track came around, i was the teams top mile runner. so i trained hard over the summer. during my freshman year, i acheived varsity status about 2/3 of the way into the season, got all-conference second team, and a letter. so began my running career in high school. i was all conference all four years in CC, and two years in track. i was MVP my senior year in track and field. i really liked running, but i guess it never became a passion enough to make me great. i have sort of lost touch with that whole scene lately, but i am trying to get back into some distance running. lately, i have been doing some weight lifting, though it hasn’t changed the fact that i am a scrawny white kid.

well, i’m giving up the “anonymous” thing. i did it mostly because i was part of the byu 100 hour board culture. the first posts on this blog were in response to some of the 100 hour board writers (though if you look now you will see i have consolidated other blogs into this one, so there are older posts), so it just seemed natural that i would take on an anonymous persona like the writers. over time i’ve kind of moved away from the whole board thing. it was fun, and a lot of my friends now are from those associations, but i think its time that i take a new step with the blog. really, most of the people reading this already know who i am, but for any of you who don’t, here we go. my name is ryan johnson. i am going to post a series of blogs that i wrote back in january 2006 about myself (but never actually posted anywhere). some things have changed, some things haven’t. i hope you enjoy.

part 1

well, i guess i just feel like writing down a bit about who i am. i know only a small handful of people will ever read this, and most of it you probably know all ready, but here it goes.

my name is ryan allan johnson. i have no idea where the name comes from, but ryan does mean “little king”, so i am pretty proud of that. i was born in baraboo wisconsin and i’m currently 22 years old. i was raised there until the age of 18. we have lived in the same house since i was 1 year old. i finished my secondary education in may of 2002, and in october of 2002, i entered the missionary training center of the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints in provo utah to study japanese and prepare to be a missionary in japan. i served there for two years, and returned home to the united states in november of 2004. i started my undergraduate work at brigham young university in januray of 2005, and i so far i have completed two semesters and one term. i have gone from electrical engineering to physics and finally to computer engineering as my major, and i am planning to minor in japanese.

i have never struggled academically. i acheived straight A’s up through high school, with the exception of a B in english my junior year. i was ranked 5th in my class at graduation. of the four AP tests i took, i scored three 5’s and one 4 (my high school didn’t provide too many opportunities for AP tests…). in my early years, at least from the writings i have from the time, it appears i hated math with a passion, but during high school it became one of my favorite subjects. i also greatly enjoyed computer programming classes. after completely all of the available computer classes by my sophomore year, i did one year of independant study, then one year of university level classes at the local university of wisconsin campus. i also enjoyed science, except for biology, which i thought sucked pretty hard. english became my most hated class, as i do not enjoy writing essays (yet here i am typing away…). i had the exact same english teacher for 5 semesters in high school (he taught the advanced courses which i was dumb enough to take), so i started to really dislike the guy, even though in hindsight, he was pretty nice. if it weren’t for english, i could have gotten a higher final ranking. before i came to school, i was awarded the heritage scholarship, which is an 8 semester full-tuition scholarship. i am really grateful that i haven’t had to worry as much about financial stuff because of it. i really have no money saved at all… the classes i have enjoyed the most have been my principles of physics courses, my elementary linear algebra course, and my weight lifting course (even though I got a B in it because of silly grading policies). next semester, i am taking 16 credits. i am taking an advanced java programming, differential equations, a third principles of physics course (electromagnetism, etc), japanese literature, and honors american government and history (the honors version of american heritage for you BYU kids..). i think it should be a lot of fun.

so, i’ve been a bit blah lately. mostly having to do with being in a very one sided relationship with the computer labs on campus. they take up all of my time without really giving much back…. nevertheless, i am alive and healthy, so i should be grateful. i was doing some transcribing of my mission journal (yes, this project has been going on for four years and i am not even half way through….) and i came across this passage which really made me feel a lot better to read again (especially the steve jobs-like “boom”). though its personal, i think its worth sharing in case it has a positive effect on any of my readers.

03.10.10 [Friday] Well, it was a good day. This morning we housed. Same as usual really. Though people seemed not to be home more than usual. Sheesh. We ate lunch, then went to service, which ended up not happening, since Ma-kun was feeling a bit sick. So we streeted for awhile, then we went to visit Kozasa kyoudai. He got a severe burn on his hand and foot at work, so he is in the hospital. We went there and found him. He was happy to see us so talked for awhile, gave him some bananas (his favorite food), and prayed with him. Then he walked using a little rolling stand to lean on with all the way to the front entrance and waved for a really long time with a big smile on his face. It felt good to see him so genki after our visit (he is usually a very shy + quiet person). Then we took dinner, after which we had our lesson with Kaori. Amazing lesson! The Yamazaki’s jointed and helped us out a ton. Kaori has been keeping her commitments, which has made all the difference in the world. We spent about 20 minutes just talking about how the Book of Mormon has affected our lives. Kaori said when she read and prayed her day seemed so much better and work was a lot more fun. She knew that there was something good in the book. Then she said she though it would be nice if she could get the Gift of the Holy Ghost. Boom. During this whole time while she was testifying (without knowing it), the Spirit was very very thick in the room. All of us went around the room testifying of the BoM, and the Spirit continued. I just felt like the baptismal yotei was a done deal and from then on it was just formalities. So we quickly ran through the lesson, making sure she understood the first principles and ordinances of the Gospel, and answering her questions. It felt completely like a no pressure situation since the Spirit had already said it was a done deal, so the lesson was very relaxed and easy. Everyone got a big crack out of Elder Thompson forgetting step 3, baptism. Sheesh. Anyway, we got through the principles, asked her if baptism was important which she thought it was, then we asked her if she would receive it. She asked if she was qualified and we said we would help her to be, so then she said yes! We set the date for November 9th (my birthday which I didn’t mention) and we told her to start praying daily about it. I think things are going to go well. She already has good relationships with the members and she is very excited. She got off work this Sunday so she could come to General Conference. I hope she has a spiritual time. The biggest problem I see is her work since she works at a grocery store which busiest hours are Sunday mornings, but we will work things out! Woohoo, the first yotei I’ve seen! Se it really does happen! The lesson last night made us feel like a very small part of this whole work. It is really in God’s hands. Tuesday we fretted and worried and prayed trying to get ready for the lesson and things fell through, but today we really didn’t worry about it. And when we went in and the Spirit was strong at the beginning, it wasn’t about how well we taught or anything like that. It was all Heavenly Father who got her ready for the challenge. We merely took care of the formalities. It was great!