A Tuesday Chiasmus

A Chiasmus is a literary pattern in which ideas are repeated in reverse order, in order to highlight the centermost idea. Alma 36 gives an example of a chiasmus, and so might my day today. This evening, as I washed a new mug I was given, I recalled that I washed a load of dishes this morning. Then I thought of another thing I did this evening that was similar to things I had done this morning. The more I thought about it, the more parallels I saw. Now I'm wondering where the center of the reflected similarities of my day is, and what significance that moment may have (if any).

My day began with doing some homework for an online class and doing a little bit of singing as I washed dishes. It ended with washing a new mug, after having done a little bit of singing while watching the children of several Relief Society sisters. During each of these activities (and they almost could be called activities), I found some enjoyment in completing tasks that, while still being tasks, were less difficult than I had expected them to be.

Late in the morning and early in the evening, I received guidance and correction concerning actions I had taken, and these experiences, while nerve-wracking, could have gone a lot worse. This evening, one of my supervisors at the SCC Writing Center, where I work as a tutor, watched me tutor a student, and then gave me feedback on how the tutoring session went. Though I was terribly nervous during the tutoring session, the session went pretty well. The corrections my supervisor suggested were minor ones, more like a few tips for how I could do my job better than a list of problems I needed to fix if I wanted to keep my job at all. All in all, the evaluation went well, so I guess I got pretty lucky.

I was lucky late this morning, too. (And this is my first time telling anyone about this, so I extend my apologies to those I should have told sooner.) This morning, on my way to school, I got pulled over. I ride my bike to school. Sometimes, I don't feel like letting my brakes eat up all my momentum, just so my legs can build it back up. Sometimes, I pass through Stop signs without actually stopping. The motorcycle cop informed me that I didn't even check to see if any cars were coming. But, thankfully, the cop let me off with a warning that wasn't so much of a warning of potential punishment as it was a warning of potential injury. I spent the rest of the day riding my bike almost the same way as I would have ridden a motorcycle - stopping for Stop signs, staying off the sidewalk, and even merging into traffic lanes when the bike lane was blocked. It felt more dangerous, but it was probably safer than the way I had been riding before.

Before or after my mild reproofs, I was given gifts. The late afternoon gift was the mug I washed later this evening. It's more like a thermos, really. It's tall, red, lidded, and insulated, and it has a school logo on it. Only Sac City tutors can get a mug like this. it even says "Sac City Tutor" on it. The late morning gift was a T-shirt provided by the Sac City Institute. Every so often (each semester, I think), the Institute provides a T-shirt for each Institute student. The designs change frequently, but they all say "Sac City Institute of Religion" on them. Both of those gifts were given to me by groups I've belonged to for quite some time, and they serve as tokens of my belonging to those groups. I'll be proud to wear my new T-shirt and drink from my new mug.

At this point, I'm approaching the mid-point of my day, and I'm not sure there's anything blogworthy in it. After being given the T-shirt and spending some time at the Institute, I went to the school library to study logarithms for the Math test I'll be taking tomorrow morning, after which I went to piano class, and then went to work at the library. The literal midpoint of my day seems to be piano class, but nothing really noteworthy happened then. I practiced our song for a while, then I performed it for the teacher, and she said I had it down pretty well. I still have to perform it one last time for the final (plus, there'll be a "written" exam, and then the semester will officially be over for me, unless I decide to write a bonus essay for my literature class for extra credit, which I probably won't.

So, the chiasmus kind of failed, but it also succeeded in a different way. While there's not much of interest about my piano class or studying for the math test, looking for the midpoint of my day got me to consider the many other blogworthy things that happened today: having fun even while working (and even finding the work itself fun), learning from correction that was probably kinder than I deserved, and finding out that I'm proud to belong to the groups that I belong to. Had those each been their own blog posts, their morals might have been that having fun, especially by singing songs that attract the Spirit, can make work easier, that God gives us gentle correction because He loves us and wants to see us thrive and not get hurt, and that we should pick good friends and not be ashamed to let people know that we belong to the group called The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In the end, there are many blogworthy lessons to be learned from the day I had today - just not from the middle of the day.