Desk Space

So I am moving out of the grad cubes this week (they are kicking me out for new blood), thus I decided I would take a few pictures first.

My desk for the last two years (I had this desk before I had an apartment here)

This is my desk. Most of the papers on the right are fun personal mementos from people, the ones on the other sides are references for school stuff. My paperclip change is on the right and my textbooks and folders are on the shelf. My rocks, bones, and dinosaur figurines re in the left corner. The drawers are filled with snacks, scrap paper, old school papers, useful things (like calculators, rulers, etc.). The bottom left hand corner drawer is opened slightly (not intentional), that is the drawer I always pull out to rest my feet on.

I think it is a pretty neat desk, overall, with some personal touches. I think the grad cubes are interesting because each person has the same desk but they use (and decorate) their desks very differently.

One guy likes using his desk but if he is not using it currently everything is spotless, there is nothing on his desk, everything he has is hiding in a drawer (he even took his name tag down for a while... which caused confusion).

Then a couple of the guys use their desks as storage area, so they just get piled with junk and they never use it for anything else.

Another guy has junk all over his desk but his shelves are a well displayed rock collection.

A couple of other people have super organized desks with their school stuff and office supplies are perfectly in order but they also have family pictures enshrined on the peg board.

I like my desk clean, and I don't mind a little personalization but most of it is in the way I display my rocks not in personal items per se (except for the paperclips :) ). What is interesting, but unsurprising is that how we use our desks reflects our personality, displaying quirkiness, organization, openness, etc.

People are different. 

"Words are Hard"

This is the phrase that one of my mission companions would always say when either of us stumbled over our words.
This week I came across two different words that are commonly used but still used vaguely (at least I use them vaguely). It makes it difficult to communicate ideas when you and your audience may not understand a word in the same way.
First: Exactness
In the LDS church people often talk about obeying commandments (and rules) with exactness. I have never particularly liked the phrase I always read it with exactness being synonymous with perfectness, which is just humanly impossible (and God does not ask the impossible) Then, this week someone said that obeying with exactness meant there was no gray in life, only black and white... and nice(?) as that thought is I just don't see the world as black and white.... So I looked up exactness on google. It reads "the quality of being accurate or correct; precision." Which as you may notice says nothing about perfect.... I looked at another article about accuracy and precision. In my words accurate means being correct while precision means consistent. And I think I can obey with correctness and consistency even when I can't obey with perfection. The best thing about the above mentioned article, at least for my purposes is the image showing what accuracy and precision looks like when you are shooting at a target. Notice how even with high accuracy and precision the shots are not all dead center. So, I guess I have no problem with the phrase obey with exactness anymore... I just had to look up the word I though I knew.
Second: Mature
A group of my geology friends were talking about which of us was the most mature. One girl was nominated as the most mature (even though she is the youngest of us), but then I got wondering if we were just judging on who the most controlling person was. This one was a little trickier to find the right definition (we were obviously talking about physical maturity or the maturity of an industry). But I found this definition on the Merriam-Webster online dictionary "having of showing the mental and emotional qualities of an adult." I think that is roughly what we were all thinking of for as the definition of mature.... but it is still a vague term. I mean does that mean we should have been judging on the adeptness of planning out our lives and jobs, or the ability to control our stress in appropriate ways, or being consistently reliable in what we say we will do... I have no idea... I guess that one we would have to define for the moment.
Sometimes I am just floored that communication is possible at all with how messy and imperfect words (and nonverbal communication) are.