Revolt

Protest seems to be the word on everyone's lips these days. Sometimes it even feels like I'm in a real college town, what with all the demonstrations and campaigns going on around here.

My co-worker Keri, frustrated by the oppressive system we have at work for who gets to wait on which tables, complained aloud and announced her plan to bring about change when she gasped, "Why don't I ever make any tips? I am REVOLTING!"

I told her she'd just answered her own question. I don't think she caught the joke.

My friend Hero, also in the spirit of social reform, performed a small demonstration against the Malt Shop on University Avenue recently. He told the girl that he wanted the Wednesday student two-for-one special and asked for a shake and a root beer freeze. She sent the order back and then charged him almost eight dollars.

"Eight dollars! I asked for the two-for-one deal!"

"well, you can't get the two-for-one deal with the freeze. Only shakes," said the bovine employee, repeating the price through a mouthful of cud.

Well, Hero is the sort of being whose whole night can be ruined by one single interaction with an imbecile. This girl could have told him that he couldn't get the discount on the freeze before sending the order through. She also refused to cancel it. So he paid for the shake and the freeze, and when they came, he dumped half his shake on the carpet in protest. Then he said "whoops," stepped in the mess, and marched out of there. It was funny.

Meanwhile, real and actually organized protests have abounded recently.

One involved unattractive vegetarians standing on the street corner right in front of the restaurant at which I work, making out in their underwear and telling people to avoid meat, and handing out tracts with pertinent quotes about animals and their souls and brains from such leading spiritual and scientific leaders as Paul McCartney and Pamela Anderson. As I've said before, I think there must be some sort of animal by-product in soap, because Vegans always seem to need a shower. These ones had a mattress out there and had adopted the slogan, "Vegetarians make better lovers." If anything, having mostly-naked people dancing about in front of our store only increased our business that day, and I made sure to suggest the steak enchiladas or the beef chimichanga to every customer I got. I sold tons.

Then there were some whose causes I respected a little more.

The first surrounded a controversy over BYU's firing of a man named Todd. If you live in the Provo bubble, you have probably heard whispers of this story. The reason I am retelling it now is that I have a little bit of ironic personal involvement in this story.

Todd was a grown-up who worked for the BYUSSR, more legitimately known as the BYUSA. He had a number of job responsibilities, one of which had something to do with BYUSA "elections." Over the course of his years at BYUSA, Todd noticed some unsettling glitches in the operation of the BYUSA electorate machine. So he decided to write a letter in the Daily Universe which decried the entire process, pointing out that an anonymous cadre of randomly selected students were put in charge of disqualifying candidates, a power which he inferred had been used unfairly by members of the group to aid their friends.

Certainly the letter was timely; this past election was once again riddled with scandal as students were disqualified for getting photocopies of campaign papers run off with a discount at a private copying center rather than at whatever the committee deemed to be "market price," whatever that means (there is a rule in the election procedures that students need to spend their campaign funds only on items they purchase at "market price"). The discount they received was actually available to all the other candidates. It was time for somebody to speak up, and Todd was our man. He mailed out that letter to the DU.

So they fired him. That's right, BYU fired Todd for publicly calling into question practices of the organization for which he worked. They offered him hush money, saying that if he would agree to not disclose the reason for which he was fired, they would continue to give him health insurance and other benefits for a grace period. Todd, always one to stand against censure and the man, refused the offer and sent off another letter to the Daily Universe. Soon a full-scale real protest was in full swing, with students duct-taping their mouths symbolically.

Well, I see some interesting parallels between myself and this Todd fellow....

***FLASHBACK ABOUT A YEAR***

Once upon a time there was a small community of smurfs that lived somewhere in the woods of Belgium in stone houses that looked like mushrooms to the untrained eye. Further into the wood, they had a computer, and it was attached to the internet, and the smurfs found a BYU website called the Hundred Hour Board, where BYU students could anonymously and cleverly answer people's questions about anything and everything. They applied to write for the Board, and were accepted, and in the time during which our story takes place, they had been writing for the Board for several months, and it was their raison d’être. Then one day a dark oppressive shadow loomed over their idyllic little forest. BYUSA decided to censor the Hundred Hour Board. The poor little smurfs ran for shelter, but they were too late. Soon all was black in their forest. Were they defeated? No. They made a last-ditch effort to battle the forces of the evil bureaucracy, answering questions just as they always had. One day a question came in about how to improve race relations on campus. The smurfs pulled out all the stops, giving an informative yet amusing answer, citing examples shared with them by real minorities attending BYU. Before that answer could ever post, however, it caught the attention of one of BYUSA's cronies, who was floating around in the smoggy cloud overhead. He sent the smurfs a letter, demanding that they remove any evidence of actual instances of racism on campus. The smurfs refused, and used the last of their energy to respond angrily (although cleanly) to this unreasonable letter. But they were too late. The next time they tried to visit the computer, it had been slashed to pieces by BYUSA, and they were never able to log in on the computer again.

So you see, I can totally relate to Todd's little predicament. But if you grease the machine for long enough, Todd, eventually it'll slip and cut you.

Also I should mention that this Todd fellow is the selfsame troll who was censoring the Board, and who kicked me off. So while I admire the fact that you finally grew a backbone and tried to take a stand against the monster, I still have to chuckle at the irony of the giant monster swallowing you up after you helped feed it until it grew big enough to eat you too. Hahaha, Todd. Seriously, that's what you get, especially when you mess with THIS smurf.

I'm not still bitter about it, I swear.

Later that same week, there was another on-campus protest, led by a group called Soulforce. Soulforce was a group of thirty-two gays and lesbians who decided to rent a bus and tour religious and military universities to help stop "religious oppression" of homosexuals, as they put it. Their leaders said at a rally the night before the protests began that BYU was the "crowned jewel" of the tour.

I didn't attend any of the on-campus events, but I came near the protests at the park. I couldn't hear much that was being said because the rumble of the generator they used to power the microphone was louder than the microphone itself.

Soulforce's points were many. They cited the numbers of gay Mormon teen suicides (a BYU student named Matt even took the mic and testified about his own failed suicide attempts), said that BYU students are uneducated about and intolerant of homosexuals, and basically just complained a lot. They said that their surveys showed that more than ninety percent of BYU students said they wouldn't want a homosexual as a roommate. I'm skeptical, to say the least.

Your name: Smurf

1) Would you rather have roommates who are gay or straight?

a) gay ___
b) straight _x_

2) Would you be ok with a lesbian roommate?

a) yes ___
b) no _x_

See? Even I don't pass the test. It's all in the way you word it. And I present as evidence to the contrary Asmond, BAWB, Toasteroven, Gravy, and the Snake, all of whom willingly entered roommate situations with gay kids and/or were staunch defenders of them afterward.

At any rate, I had several beefs with Soulforce's message.

1: "Religious oppression of homosexuals?" I'm doubly offended. I don't appreciate three dozen hippies coming to my school to tell me that I'm at once oppressor and oppressed.

2: The use of Gandhi's and Martin Luther King Jr.'s countenances in their logo. I don't care if they DID have permission from relatives of the two men. This was a cause that a Hindu and a southern reverend would NEVER have been behind. In the words of Alecia, my sassy black manager, upon her hearing about the logo, "Oh HEEEEELL no!" That's just plain offensive.

3: The issues presented were for the most part issues from years past. Today's political climate with regard to homosexuals is one of tolerance at worst, even here in conservative Utah. The head lesbian was a minister for some religion and proudly claimed to have been excommunicated thrice, eventually leaving the church altogether and taking up residence with her former visiting teacher. She delivered an angry speech, much like those presented by other alumni, about how horrible it was to attend BYU. The problem was that she was speaking to a bunch of students who currently attend BYU and were having trouble seeing any of the problems she mentioned.

4: The idea of the homosexuals blaming religion for the suicides. It just pisses me off. The problem isn't solely with either side. The problem is the imagined chasm between the two sides, with poor youths feeling trapped with a foot on either side. Religion and homosexual tendencies are not naturally at odds. For years, churches painted the picture thus, but our church has come a very long way in the manner in which its leaders deal with those who experience same-sex attraction. We are aware that feelings of incongruousness between a religion believed to be true and an immutable sexual desire believed to be false can cause great psychological trauma to our young people. But just when our little bubble community seems to be taking steps to find middle ground, the other camp pulls away even more vehemently, and those chasm-straddlers are going to find themselves falling to one side or the other or down into the blackness. We need to be closing the gap from BOTH sides.

5: They weren't friendly. Tell them you're a closeted homosexual fighting to keep your sexual identity under wraps until just barely after graduation, and they'll welcome you with open arms and offer you the drinks they're serving in the corner. But stand with the small peaceful counter-protest (as I did) and suddenly you'll find an angry middle-aged redhead in a pantsuit storming toward you and unsavorily unplugging your music. Many of the lesbians from the bus decided to smoke on campus, or march around distributing fliers and otherwise breaking the protest rules set forth by the university. The smoking thing particularly got my goat, since not only is it a BYU rule that one cannot smoke on campus, but it is also against the state laws of Utah to smoke within a hundred feet of a public building. When students (such as my roommate Asmond) kindly asked the lesbians to refrain from smoking in front of their workplace, the lesbians took it as an affront on their message and their sexual identity and refused to either extinguish their cigarettes or move along.

The counter-protest was kinda weak, really. There was an insane hispanic woman with two people I can only assume were her own progeny, shouting "Shame on you" louder than the speakers AND the generator. "Let me tell jew something jew don't know," she said to me, advancing until she would have been right in my face had she been a foot taller. I let her, but she only told me things I already knew or that I still don't believe, like the idea that the gay movement is secretly being run by politicians and filmmakers who aren't actually gay themselves but rather hope to make a buck off the whole idea. Then there was a guy whose wife and daughter were playing on the playground while he distributed his own manifesto to the classy tunes of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir under a banner that read "You want your freedom of expression; please allow us ours." Then there was me, standing silently in the cold with my arms crossed, the ever non-partisan participant.

Why was I standing with the counter-protest? I just wanted someone to know that Soulforce does not speak for me. I don't think I'm a radical. I don't imagine for one second that I'm typical. But I like to think I am reasonable, at least. I didn't appreciate Soulforce's rhetoric. I didn't like their tying depression and suicide to homosexuality. I especially didn't appreciate that they purported to represent me. AND accuse me. As Wiggle so often repeats, "You don't KNOW me."

My old friend LLama was the one person whose actions that day receive a full endorsement from me. He was out there distributing lists of resources for people who are trying to deal with homosexuality in a positive church context. Way to be, LLama.

So, the point is that BYU seems to be at least taking a step forward by allowing these protests on campus, right? Especially after the American Association of University Professors put us on its list of censured schools in 1997 after a female professor was allegedly fired for being pro-choice and feminist.

But wait, by some coincidence(?), the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities happened to be visiting our school that same week that the protests were being graciously (and uncharacteristically) allowed on campus. This is the organization that every ten years decides whether BYU should maintain its accreditation status. So the question remains, is BYU actually becoming a more progressive school, or is it just trying to save face for the man?

Amid all this chaos, the Mexicans are enojados. It seems they feel they are under-appreciated. I'll agree with that. On May first, there is to be a nation-wide walk-out for all trabajadores of hispanic descent. In other words, the Mexican restaurant where I work is going to have an absolute dearth of cooks and dish washers that day. The owners are considering making Alecia cook fajitas and serving everything on paper plates all day. I guess Alecia is the next closest thing we have to Mexican after the real Mexicans and the Chileans and Salvadorians and all.

Now here's where it gets interesting for me. Norma and the other cooks and dish washers have told me that I'd better not come to work that day. After all, I am one quarter Mexican, and would be doing my old abuelita great dishonor by coming to work on that day. If our restaurant weren't situated exactly in the heart of downtown, I might just ignore their invitation. And also if it didn't have huge glass windows that look right out onto the street where the main demonstrations will be going on. And if the cooks hadn't been whispering about how they fully expect things to turn quickly into a riot.

And really, I do respect their cause, and my grandmother, and all. The last thing I want to be is a scab. So not only am I moderately interested in their cause, and medium terrified of the prospect of a thousand illegal immigrants hopped up on tequila coming at me with whatever the Mexican equivalent of pitchforks and torches is while I'm at work, and extremely excited about the idea of a totally good excuse to not show up for work for a whole day, but I also am relieved when I check my calendar and realize that the whole thing is moot because I have Mondays off anyway. I think I'll go have me some all-you-can-eat fajitas that day, as long as Alecia's cooking.

So there you have it, folks. Three major protests going on, all of which really relate to me (after all, I am a BYUSA-censored, homosexual, Mormon who is descended from illegal Mexican immigrants), and yet while I feel passionately about each of those subjects, I just can't find myself getting behind any of those causes.

You want to know the cause I CAN get behind? Protesting Panda Express. Seriously, Gravy and I always talked about marching in front of that store with signs that say "Don't believe their lies!" and "Panda Express is chicken" and distributing PETA-esque pamphlets that explain that there is no actual panda meat in ANY Panda Express products. I can't believe the number of people who still eat there, seemingly unaware of the flagrant false advertising. I hope Vero will be back in town on May first, because I am off work that day, and I'd bet she would help me with my movement. And that day is perfect, because there won't be any workers there to come out and stop us. Because after all, not only is their panda secretly just chicken, but their Chinamen are secretly just Mexicans.

Double Feature

Part One: Homemaking Night

So Pinetree has this roommate. He's a nice guy, but he has some questionable taste. Like, for instance this poster that he puts up in their living room. It's all, "Marines: liberators, protectors, warriors." And it shows this marine all gussied up in his killing gear and it looks kinda like this, only nighttime:















And so naturally, Pinetree hates the poster, right? I mean, besides being flagrant propaganda, it's not like it's even a cool picture. Seriously it's lots lamer than the above picture. So anyway, Pinetree comes up with this ingenious plan. We're gonna steal the poster. Only we can't just take it down, because then it will be totally obvious that he did it, because who else cares what posters are up in somebody's house? So Pinetree decides to make up some girls and then we can frame them.

So I borrow some pink and yellow construction papers from Wiggle and write in my stupid-girl handwriting a message that's all, "If you ever want to see your poster again come to apartment 9 tomorrow at 7" or something. And then I cut it up in little puzzle pieces.

Then we decide to make some cookies to sweeten the deal, with a little note that's like, "There's more where this came from." But we also decide to make the cookies really nasty just because that's funny, right?

Well, a few days pass, and before we can get in there to do it we end up at Denny's at midnight with a buncha friends, including Vero Awesome. And she's all, "Time for frivolity, yo." So we're all, yeah, let's go make cookies. And somebody has the sweet idea to just buy some cookies at the store and then frost them with something nasty. So we choose toothpaste. The only problem with toothpaste is it might not be nasty enough, and there's a little note on the box that goes, "If more than the normal amount used for brushing is swallowed, contact a physician or a poison control center immediately." So we're worried they'll be all, "Mmmm, minty cookies" and eat 'em all and totally croak, as opposed to them being all, "Blech! Aquafresh cookies! Angry!" and then we all laugh. So we go to the store, and we open one container to see if it's nasty enough, but it's blue stripes, so before we even try it, we decide to close it back up and put it back on the shelf. But it's not staying closed, see, so we go to the tape aisle and get some tape and tape it shut and put it back. And the tape. We put them both back.

And then we decide on the Pepsodent and it's white, and it's me and Vero and Wiggle and Pinetree, and Wiggle says we need sprinkles to heighten the effect, and she's right of course. S owe get those too, and Vero wants to also give cookies to these two dudes we work with named Ryan and Greg who are roommates, so we get more cookies and we get cards for them. And we sit around in the parking lot, frosting the cookies with ghetto plastic knives I horked from the deli part of the store, even though it was closed and all these break-taking employees were sitting over there looking at me like, "What the? Did that Arabian dude just walk in here and steal plastic knives?" And yes, yes I did.

So we frost the cookies, and the womenfolk sign the cards (which are perfect to begin with because they talk about "more love where these come from" or some crap), and Vero gives us two wonderfully horrible long dyed-red hairs to frost into the cookies (one for each plate). Then we are still a bit worried about, like, what if the guy eats the cookies and is all, "mmm, like thin mints, delish!" and eats them all and dies. After all, the box the paste came in has that little warning on the bottom for a reason, I point out. So Wiggle suggests we just cut that thing out and tape it on the bottom of the plate of cookies. Good thinking, Wiggle! So we do, thus assuaging our guilt in a very legally permissible way.

And we go to Greg and Ryan's first, and Racherella tells us where they keep their key, and I go, but I can't find the key, so I doorbell ditch it and go running out of there like a rabbit from a dog show. But on the way out Vero notices that we got the wrong apartment, so I go back, and fortunately the plate and the card are still sitting there, and we take it to the right apartment and I go in and leave it on their counter and this time sneak out like a mouse at a, um, nother dog show.

And then we go to Pinetree's, and Vero Awesome takes the cookies and the feminine puzzle and comes back out with the poster (remember that's why we did all this in the first place?) and we give it to Dice and we go home and go to bed. It was frickin' awesome, and it reminded me that I can have mischievous fun without getting the police involved.

Part Two: Connections

I have been to see Dr. Robinson four times now. He's incredible. He talks to me for forty-five minutes, asking questions and taking these big long pauses as he considers what to say next. When I speak, he writes everything down, scribble scribble scribble, on his clipboard. He goes through several sheets of paper each time, because I can be quite loquacious. I told him next time I'm bringing a clipboard and writing down everything he says, and then pausing for a few minutes and sighing before responding every time, and see how HE likes it. I don't know if he even understood what I was talking about on that one. After the forty-five minutes he starts telling ME things, and the pieces click together, and I feel like I have been tricked into learning so much.

Anyway, the first time we were together, he taught me something cool that I had thought I already knew about myself and the way brains work.

He gave me an example. He said we take the word "cat." And we take the spelling of the word. He drew this all out for me on paper. He said we can take a baby and teach it that the word means the spelling, and it will learn it. You say the word, the baby will pick out the spelling. He said that we can then take the cat itself and teach the baby that the word means the cat. Then he said that we can also teach these things to animals. A dolphin or a dog or a bird can learn to pick the right one from among misleading choices. You say "cat" and the monkey will point to the cat.

The difference, he said, is that the baby will also automatically learn that the spelling means the word, as well. He will learn it both ways. He will also learn that the cat means the word. And then he will learn that the spelling means the actual cat and vice versa. Humans make six automatic connections where the animals will learn only two. It's what sets us apart as humans, he said. Our ability to make connections. Our minds become a web of connections and it's how we learn and deal with the world.

The cool thing is that I am well aware that my mind forms these connections. I assign everything a color, I spell it out in my head. I alphabetize all items in groups. Like you say "colors," and I start to think "amethyst, apricot, azure, black, blue, brown, burgundy, burnt orange, etc...." And that's just now off the top of my head. The Human mind is amazing. Given a minute or two, we can eventually find a specific link, no matter how feeble between any two given things. For instance, if you had to say how turnips are the opposite of marbles, you could. Or you could find a way in which carpets are the parent of Puff Daddy.

Anyway, the good Dr. R. next drew the word "Rob." That's my dad's name, as well as a variant of my own, since we technically have the same name. So then he wrote "Dad" and draws an arrow between the two. Then he wrote "me" and drew an arrow from "Rob" to "me." Are you picturing this? then he draws all the other arrows, back from "me" to "Rob" and from "Dad to "Rob" and between "me and "Dad" both ways. No wonder I balk at anyone's calling me "Rob," he says. I immediately connect myself to my dad, and his failures. He next wrote "disaster" and drew the arrow from "Dad" to that. And then all kinds of other scary things my dad has done. And all of it connected to me and my dad through arrows.

I'd always known my brain does that, you see. I just had only been paying attention to the aspect of the connection building that helps me to win board games. I wasn't aware that it was also leading to problems in my life.

So the goal is not to break down those connections, but rather to loosen them, and to build up stronger connections that will supersede those other ones.

This last time we talked about prayer, among other things. Dr. Robinson said he has some patients whom he can't cajole into praying, and that he thinks that's a major factor for success. And on the way home (I always walk home so I can process what I've learned), a thought struck me. On my mission I worked very hard to actually "pray always," as Second Nephi suggests. I spent a lot of time studying and pondering how to actually do that. And I learned some helpful methods. One has simply to direct his thoughts, whatever they be about, to God, keeping Him in the forefront of the mind at all times. One can in this way be sure that his actions are in step, as well. It's the idea behind the CTR ring. Every time you see it there on your finger, you remember the good that you need to be doing. On my mission I met a man named Elías, who was trying to quit smoking. This is not a happy mission story where we helped him to quit smoking and he got baptized and is now first counselor in the branch presidency. It's just a time that I learned an important lesson. One day Elías had a piece of string tied around his finger. He said it was to help him remember to not smoke. When asked about the efficacy of the string, he replied that it didn't work because it kept coming off, and he'd forget. So I gave him my CTR ring. I told him that every time he saw it or felt it or noticed it, he was to pray for the strength he'd need to quit smoking. And I promised him that every time I noticed that the ring was gone or my finger felt naked, I'd pray for him as well. And it worked, as far as reminding me went. I didn't need the ring to remember to choose the right. The absence of the ring could serve the exact same function.

So on this walk home from my weekly session with the therapist, I came to realize that praying always was simply a matter of making everything remind me to choose the right. I had to make ALL the connections connect back to God. I looked around me at the mountains and the sun and the long straight stretch of University Avenue and saw gospel symbolism and turned my thoughts to God. But it's easy with roads and mountains. I needed to connect EVERYTHING. Turnips and carpet and cats and Puff Daddy and my own daddy all need to make me think of God and the things with which he has blessed me and the things he requires of me.

And when I do spiritual things, like going to church or the temple or reading my scriptures, I need to relate them back to the rest of my life, so that those connections already exist when I go out into the world. I realized that's why Nephi also tells us to liken the scriptures to ourselves. It's why Christ taught his parables using images from the people's daily lives. Not just because those are the things they could understand, but also because those are the images the people would be seeing every day after Christ was no longer in their presence.

At one point this last week, Dr. Robinson just leaned back, sighed contemplatively, and said, "You're very weird." That has to make you feel great, right? When a guy whose job it is to deal with crazy people tells you you're very weird? Anyway, the week before he'd been telling me I needed to cut out everything gay in my life, because it could become a trigger. But this last time he said he wasn't so sure any more. I could tell he was struggling to reconcile this with his hard fast rules he'd (until then) entertained. At any rate, we both left there wondering what to do, but by the time I got home I knew. I need to consecrate myself a little more. I need to keep saying my prayers throughout the day, every time I need something or am thankful for something or thinking of someone. I need to connect my life and my surroundings to my God, so that all things point more directly toward him, because I owe him, and I love him.

Mood Music

Some thoughts on music. I put three new songs over on the side here for El Veneno. I hope you guys will listen to all three. I love them all. The first (the one you are probably hearing right now) is from the CD that the Neverbird gave me for my birthday. I love the message it contains, about pressing forward when you're not sure about things. The next is War on Drugs by the Barenaked Ladies. It's one of the most moving songs I know of. They said at their concert that they were singing about a bridge in Canada that had the world's second-highest suicide rate (after the Golden Gate). When the city put a net under the bridge, people just moved up to the next bridge and started jumping from there. So that was the basis of the song, and it has helped me to understand people who suffer from depression more than anything else ever has. Finally, we have a song that is simultaneously funny and sad. It's called Jim Henson's Dead and Gone, by Stephen Lynch, the same guy who does Dead Puppies and If I Could Be a Superhero. I love Muppets, and so I present this song as an homage to Jim Henson. What a brilliant man, who really seemed to understand dreams and making them a reality.

In fact, my dinner group has recently been transformed into a dinner/muppets group. I love that. Turns out my buddy Robb is just as big a muppets fan as I am.

Robb and Pinetree both just got jobs at Los Hermanos. I love that job. I made $15/hour in tips again tonight. I have been making more than anyone else lately. It's been a major blessing. Alecia says I've been doing a great job there, which makes me very happy. I'm learning the joy of hard work, which was what I talked about in my testimony at this Sunday's Latter Day Sounds fireside in Ogden, speaking about the song Come Come Ye Saints. We can't fear toil and labor, but we have to wend our way with joy. The media would have us believe that work and joy are antithetical. That we work only so we can have joy later. But I believe that we are to find joy in serving, and not stop until we have finished our work or died trying. And then either way, it will be a happy day, and only THEN can we join the saints in crying "All is well."

Latter Day Sounds is so good for me. On Saturday Rachel stayed late at work and closed for me (I love that girl) and Nick let me off early so I could catch up with the choir in northern Utah. And so I took a bus to Ogden last-minute to go be with the choir. I ended up screaming in pain and cold in the pouring windy snowy rain, as I got drenched. It was super miserable, but we all have to make sacrifices for the things that are important to us, huh?

Like Pinetree has recently done. Wow. Dr. Robinson says that I'll have to get rid of every gay everything if I want to beat this thing. So of course I thought, "No, that is too much." But then I remembered the rich young man, and how he had been told he would have to give up all he had. And then i remembered Naaman, who really only had to give up his pride, but found that to be almost an insurmountable task, and I started thinking, "What wouldn't I be willing to give up in order to be the man that God wants me to be?" And really, there is nothing. So I am doing what I can with the Dr. Robinson suggestion. Cutting off contact with a lot of people. Identifying which parts of my life strengthen those dangerous connections that my brain makes, and cutting them out, as they stand in my way, triggers to the booby traps I've set for myself in years past, now obscured by dust. Time to bust out the pledge and figure out exactly where those triggers are, and dismantle them. Anyway, I had a long conversation with Pinetree about that yesterday, and then today he tells me he up and cut off someone who I know means a TON to him. I really appreciate his example. I feel like I learn so much from that kid. So now it's my turn to do the same. Time for some major spring cleaning.

I might be losing a lot of things in this process. A lot of friends. We will see.

But I will be okay. I have so MANY other friends who are so good for me these days. My friends from my ward, and from my choir, and from work. I love all of these people. On Friday Jessica and Goat and Wiggle and I are all going to go to see Guster. I am very excited. They have such haunting voices, and can sing melodies both happy and sad. Which brings me to what I really want to say tonight, a message inspired by everything in my life, and most recently and noticeably by the Jim Henson Company movie "Mirror Mask," which I recommend whole-heartedly to anyone who reads this. Anyway, on to today's moral:

I love music so much. It's so good for me. I like to listen to sad music best of all, because "sad" isn't easy for me to feel on my own.

I think sadness is beautiful, like rain and strong battered women and fancy melting candles and rooms all done up in red velvet. Like wildflowers growing raggedly from a crack in a barren rock, or like sputtering, flickering stars, fighting to shine their light down through earth's muggy, twinkly atmosphere. I want to cup the stars in my hand, make someone's sadness my own, protect it from the tempestuous winds of life, shade it from the overpowering glare of sunshine. In the summer, I lie in the crunchy golden grass and look at the ghosts of giants and heroes and magical beasts placed in the night sky to remind us that we all must pass on, that we are only visitors here in this strange land. And I love them. I love their stories. And then the sun comes out, and the stories fade to a soothing baby blue and all can be forgotten. The heroes and their tragic tales are lost. Their beauty exists only in the darkness.

Will Heaven be all light all the time? Or will there be shadows dancing from the fireplace onto the cozy earthen walls? Will there be the dark spaces between the stars, or will they all be filled in with such blinding light that there won't be stars any more at all? Will the forest still hold its dark secretive appeal, or will the leaves in the canopies be forced to move aside and let in the light, stripping the woods of all their murky mysteries? Will all music be in major chords, all clouds cumulus, all stories have happy endings? Will we mourn our damned loved ones? Will we have to forget we ever loved them?

In moving closer to God, will I have to be homogenized? Will we all eventually shine the same bright white, or can I shine golden, or spring green, or vivid tangerine? Will my dark desires be the catalysts that make me more like God, or will they keep me different? Do I give off my own wavelength of light just by moving close to God, a cosmic Doppler Effect that somehow allows my movement to shine my own color of beauty to the stationary viewer, even as I draw closer to the center of the Universe, where gods and matter end? Is my individuality burned up beautifully like a meteor as I draw closer to my goals? Is the incredible journey to sameness the thing that sets us apart in the end? Are our scars what make us beautiful?

I am still discovering so much. I love life. I love the light, and the dark, and the moments like these, right before the proverbial sun rises, when the field is still shrouded in mist, and everything is grey and blurry and coming coldly alive.

Genie in a Bottle

I have finally decided what my three wishes will be when I find a genie. Go ahead, fates, and throw that magic lamp in my path. I am of sound mind and finally prepared for unimaginable fortune.

Here's the list:

1. That when I finally die, it will be by spontaneous combustion.

2. A CTL ring for my left hand.

3. That when I finish counting things, lightning will flash.

I don't think I'm asking for too much.

Odd Shaped Pots and Other Nonsense

Holy Hannah, I've been busy. Sorry I haven't posted recently. Here are the main items of business:

I went to Jon and Sara's wedding. It was so great. Here's the story in pictures:






















































































I am not even going to try getting all that crap in order. Well, actually, I tried really hard, and it is just pissing me off now, and it has caused further delays, and so I give up.

But the point is this: Weddings are a TON of work, but they are awesome when the people are so right for each other and they're worthy and stuff.

I got to be co-best man, and give a toast and everything. It was so much fun. I shared the theory of the odd-shaped pots. I think now we will change it to the theory of the odd-shaped tupperware, and I will explain it here:

So you're looking for the lid to your tupperware, and if your tupperware is square or round, you can find eleven lids that ALMOST fit, but not the one that actually does. If, however, your tupperware is like a heart or a parallelogram or some long, thin rectangle, it's easy cheese to find the right lid. It practically jumps right out at you. So it is for weird people who are trying to find their soul mates. They can scan the crowd and immediately rule out all the normals and the people who are odd but not their kind of odd, and all that's left is their mate. So it is with Jon and Sara. They were so easy to set up because they were also so perfectly right for each other and wrong for anyone else. And yes, that IS what I said in the toast I made at the reception. Thank you to Jessica for sharing the theory with me in the first place.

We stayed at Shelley's brother's house, which made for what is probably the most entertaining story from the trip. When we arrived, it was the middle of the night, and Shelley's mom let us in. She was also staying there as a guest. She tried to get me and Shelley to sleep on the same mattress together, but Shelley was like, "why Don't Natalie and I share and then Smurf can have the mattress to himself. Good thinking, Shelley. Her mom was all, "Oh, please, you'll be in sleeping bags, and you can just put your heads at opposite ends. Ah, converts. Gotta love them.

But what was really strange happened before all of that. Because, you see, the moment Shelley's mom opened the front door, I heard a terrible grinding buzzing noise coming from the house. And the noise didn't go away. It would beep on and off for a minute, and then be a steady on noise for a minute, and then back to the beeping. That first night at the house was hell. I could not stand the noise. When I asked what it was, Shelley told me that it was some sort of ant repellant system, and that we couldn't turn it off. She also said that she couldn't even hear it.

So, I didn't sleep much that night. The next morning, Shelley was saying that if the neighbor's dog didn't shut up, she would go after it with a baseball bat. I tried, but I could not hear the dog over the buzzing. People were starting to think I was crazy. So was I. The next night Shelley gave me ear plugs, and those helped tremendously. I found out that her little nephews had been throwing paper airplanes at me all morning and I hadn't stirred. The following day, the kids told me that the noise was just coming from a little box in the wall, and that we could unplug it at any time. They thought my suffering was funny, especially because nobody else could even hear the horrible loud noise.

I learned a few things at the wedding, though, like that if you are a woman, the word "tool" also means some sort of lacy crap that is nice to spread around at weddings. And that brides care that all their glitter is the right way up on the tables at receptions, but it still has to look just like it fell there naturally anyway. And that taking your friend to Denny's and then walking around with him outside Disneyland and letting him look through the bars but not actually go in may be a lame bachelor party, but sometimes it seems to be just what a stressed groom-to-be needs. And also that you should stop your toast the moment everyone goes "Aaaaaaawwwww" because it can only go downhill from there. And I hope Sara learned that caesar dressing has anchovies in it, and should not be served at your wedding reception when your husband is a vegetarian weirdo.

There was also a little bit of chaos when we couldn't find the dumpster at the church building, but that wasn't enough to go into detail about here.

Seriously, I felt a bit bad about the bachelor party. I told Jon that I was going to get him a cake with a stripper inside, but then I remembered the whole vegetarian thing. I love when I can tell a joke in such a way that the recipient will say two or three more sentences and then say, "Wait, what!?"

Other stuff has happened in my life, so here are the news briefs:

I went to California AGAIN (northern this time) with my mom and Mack and the maggot. I got to sit in the back seat with the maggot and Mom and Mack sat in the front. Here's a sample of the conversation from the trip:

Mom: "Straight!" That has an h and an i!
Mack: But you were still on g!
Mom: Oh yeah.
Me: Uh, mom, "straight" has a g in it too.
Mom: Oh yeah. "Objects!" That has a j!
Mack: You can't use words that are on the truck!
Mom: But it's outside the truck!
Mack: Do you want to be outside the truck?

The point of the trip was to go to my brother Ouija's sealing to his wife, who definitely should no longer be called "flavor" on my blog, since they've been married for a whole year now. So that makes two trips to California for wedding-type things in the same month. An odd fact about the sealing: I accidentally learned her new name when I was working in the temple as a set-apart veil worker. Weird.

************************************************

n has moved here. I have also discovered Goat. And Carrot is back from her mission. It makes me extra excited that all my old friends are back in my life.

************************************************

Work is great. I've been super busy with that and my choir and the activities committee. Also, I just want to say that I love my friends in my ward. They are excellent people, all of them.

************************************************

Rose invited Dee to her bridal shower this past week. So as far as we can tell, the wedding is still going on, but maybe it's no longer a temple wedding. It's hard to say. If this wedding happens, I'm so going. And I'm also so inviting all of you, but you have to act like you don't know me at all the whole time, capiche?

************************************************

See, you'd expect me to have more to talk about with a whole month gone by, but that's just not the case. Especially when I summarize everything as neatly and compactly as I just have. In any case, My next entry will have much more detail and will deal with the events from a much narrower portion of my life, and will therefore hopefully be much more interesting. Word.

Oh, and everybody watch the Backyardigans. From Nick Jr.'s website:

"Each 3D CGI-animated episode of “The Backyardigans” is a journey into the kind of fantasy play that happens in every little kid’s mind. They’re epic, musical fantasy adventures, preschool-style, fresh from the minds of Five kids – a precocious penguin named Pablo, a laid-back moose named Tyrone, the appropriately named Uniqua, a shy kangaroo named Austin, and a Happy Hippo named Tasha.

"Every day they meet in their adjoining backyards to explore wherever their imaginations take them – be it a deep tropical rainforest, an enchanted castle, or a vast ocean.

"On each fully realized adventure, “The Backyardigans” sing and dance to tango or tap, jazz or hip-hop, calypso or operetta, rockabilly or Irish jigs.
That’s right, it’s a musical. “The Backyardigans” explore different types of music just as they explore the whole wide world without ever leaving their backyards.

"And best of all, after each adventure, they always get home just
in time for a snack!"

Seriously, you guys, this is my new favorite TV show after 24. I've only seen one episode, and the kids were superheroes and the music was salsa. It was so catchy I could hardly believe it, and the kids were pretending JUST like my friends and I used to at that age. My four-year-old sister was singing along and making me pretend to be the various characters with her. It was enchanting. I also loved that some of the characters had black voices. thy were all so freaking cute. I know that the Backyardigans is true with all the fiber in my beans. Amen.

Bob Ross Russ Rose

"Gay is the new pink."

A girl said that in my dream last night, regarding the new positive regard (and even trendiness) which popular society holds for homosexuals. I don't know if that's as funny when it's not a dream, but it sure cracked me up.

I got a job. Los Hermanos again. I start Monday or so, I think. I'm really glad I don't have to wait to take the server test. So soon I'll be back serving tables, which I absolutely love.

Seriously, fans of music, check out pandora.com. The folks there did something they call the Music Genome project. They took music and analyzed it for its different attributes, and put all the information into a huge database. Then they created Pandora, which is designed to help you to find new music that you will like because of its similarities to what you already like. You go there and you type in the name of a song or a band that you like and it will begin streaming music like a radio station. It's truly amazing. I love almost everything that comes up. And if you dislike something, you just tell it and it will skip it. On Sunday I typed in Mormon Tabernacle Choir and was delighted when it started playing hymns, spirituals, and folk sings all morning. And the rest of the week I just type in a song that fits my current mood and they will play tons of music in that exact same mood. I know pandora.com is true with all the fiber in my beans.

I talked to the Bish about the Rose sitch. He was surprised to hear an old familiar name. He said that he and Rose and my previous bishop had had a special meeting once and confronted her with her roommates' allegations that she was a man. She was unable to refute the claims, but they were unable to prove it, and as she vehemently denied the charges, they let the matter go. The bishop was most interested in the tangible evidence I'd brought (namely, a photocopy of her driver license and her immigration papers), and asked if he could keep them to bring them to the stake president, who'd reportedly been right in the thick of the whole scandal when Rose was living here. So I don't need to worry about it any more, and Bish said the evidence was exactly what they'd been waiting for. So we'll see what happens next. There will doubtless be a mess, but hopefully I'll be a few steps removed from it. D and Wiggle are afraid that if Rose is confronted with the evidence, she may put two and two together and come blaming them, since it was their basement where the documents were stored when Heather Angela Hawks rifled through the boxes and scanned everything.

N is moving here this week. I am so friggin' excited. Lad is coming in two days as well. Wiggle and I are going to see Guster in Section 6, row 1, seats 17 and 18, when they come to town on March 30. Woo-hoo.

24 was SO good last night. SO good. Jack Bauer is the man.

And my little brother Rusty got photoshop, and this is his new picture, which I think is hilarious. This kid had the Bob Ross painting instruction kit when we were little and LOVED to watch the show. I know he's white, but really, he's my full brother. Promise.


Oh, and happy Valentine's day, I guess. This seems like a non-event to me, more than ever this year. Oh well. I have been invited to do things with two different Connies, which is SUPER weird because that's my mom's name, and I am named after my dad. I don't know if I'd be comfortable with either, so I haven't responded yet. We'll see what happens.

Chaito.

A Toast

Well, thanks everyone for that little discussion. And now, back to our regularly scheduled program.

I'd like to propose a toast. Lots of things make me happy, so here's to them.

To n, on her decision to move back to Utah for the sole purpose of being closer to me.

To Wiggle, and to 3:00 a.m. spur-of-the-moment trips to Park City.

To Mario and Silvia, the couple we brought into the church in Chile, upon the recent news that they got sealed in the temple.

To Jonathan and Topsie, whose wedding in fourteen days should prove to be the first happy one I've been affiliated with since my brother's.

To Jessica, for bringing me grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup and chocolate money when I was in the depths of my illness.

To Pandora.com, for being the best music website I have ever seen.

To Hero, on his brand new engagement.

To a certain string-puller who got me eleven straight weeks of efy this summer so I won't have to pay rent. Yeah, that's supposed to remain a secret.

To the Lad, whose visit to Utah grows closer with each passing day.

To an anonymous goat on Myspace who informed me that Guster is coming and that tickets go on sale today.

To my cold, which is a great excuse for having not been out on a date this weekend.

To all the rest of my friends, for good times, lively discussions, and interesting stories.

Love you all.

I leave you with a little game I like to play called Gaydar. See if you can guess which of these two guys is a homosexual. I'll post the answer tomorrow. Enjoy.

The Heathen, the Hamster, and the Rose Revisited

This was going to be a comment on the last post, but it got wayyy too long. It's probably even too long for a regular post, but Oh, well. If you feel you've had enough of the last post, then you will probably want to skip this one. But I'd also love to hear which side you take on the matter. Please be sure to read Pinetree's comment on the previous post, Masquerade, before commenting on this one. It's a good comment.

I'm glad my blog has caused some good discussion, but I'm afraid I must whole-heartedly disagree with you guys, Pinetree and Mustard. I'm not talking about judging whether a person is a good or a bad person. I'm simply talking about telling somebody, "I think that what you are doing is a mistake, and you might not be able to see it as such."

It happens all the time. Just last night I came very close to going on a (literally) last-minute road trip to California. It was 4:00 a.m. and some friends told me they were headed to San Francisco and had room for me to come along. In the end I didn't go, not because I thought it was a bad idea, but because I didn't have any impartial person around to tell me whether it made sense to go. Some people need that all the time, and I believe everybody needs it from time to time. In the case of the girl with the pink hair, I'm not passing judgment on her character when I tell her the pink mohawk is out of line. Am I passing judgment on her hair? Sure. Is it my place? No, it WOULDN'T be. Except that now that all of the relief society has lied to her, she's going to need to hear it straight up. And with this girl, if the bishop were the only one to say something, she'd think he was crazy. "The relief society all loved it." As it was, she thought I was crazy because I was the ONLY person who answered her questions about it with the honest truth. This girl was always asking why nobody respected her or treated her like a grown-up, but she was unwilling to hear that her mohawk and other inappropriate fashion statements were injuring her image. She believed that if people judged her based on her hair, that was a flaw in their character, not hers. I agree, but I also think that to cope in such a flawed world, we need to make certain sacrifices of our own personal liberties IF we want certain reactions (like respect) from the general populace. She really would need to hear the same message from many different people. I knew her better than anybody else at the time. I'm not just some random guy making this assessment.

In the case of Hamster and his wife, I think it's important to note that I was probably the ONLY person at the wedding with closer ties to Hamster than to his wife. Everyone else was on her side, if you had to draw the line that way, and I'm sure almost everybody in attendance was ignorant of the circumstances that made this wedding so terrible. Which were that the kid has totally unresolved and even unexamined homosexual tendencies, he had been having sex with his roommate during his courtship of the bride, and the two seemed to be rushing the wedding to both legitimize their physical relationship and to magically cure the groom of his affections toward men. I was NOT opposed to the marriage on the grounds that both are ugly and they will eventually produce frightening offspring. I mentioned their physical appearance to help illustrate the full tragedy of the situation, i.e. the bitter notion that they seemed to be settling for each other rather than just being two young people caught up in the throes of lust or any other such romantic ideal that might make the readership a tad more sympathetic and falsely understanding of where these two are coming from. Of course, the ideal would be that they could both work out these issues and approach the marriage from the position where both recognize the incredible struggle up against which they're putting themselves. But from conversations I've had with them, it really did feel like they were both blithely entering into some sort of panacean marriage: take one wedding ceremony, apply two sprinkles of the Atonement, consummate vigorously, and you can overcome whatever comes your way, so no need to actually change your lifestyle before jumping into all of this.

Am I saying either is a bad person? Absolutely not. I love these kids. Am I saying they made a terrible, terrible decision? Yes. Absolutely. No doubt in my mind. Is it my place to say this to them? Maybe not. But then whose? The bishop's? Do I really believe he'd been granted all the information I have? No. I came to this wedding as the only friend Hamster had, the only one on his side of the camp who really understood where he was coming from and what his likely motivations were in getting married. And I didn't say anything. I'm not saying I should have stopped it. I'm just saying SOMEone should have been that kid to call the emperor out on being naked in the street. Someone should have at least given Hamster something to gnaw on, something to get his wheels turning so he could come at this problem more perspicaciously, having mulled over the costs and making a sound decision to move forward.

Everyone seems much more naturally opposed to Rose's wedding. Why? Because it's making a mockery of marriage? Because her fiancé might be entering into this marriage completely unaware of what he's getting himself into? I submit that Hamster's case was the same on both counts. okay, so Rose's wedding is also in the temple, whereas Hamster's wasn't but I bet people would still be strongly opposed to Rose's wedding were it a temporal one.

Now, I don't think that I should be the one to pull Rose aside and explain to him(?) that to receive the blessings of the temple he'll need to go back to being a man and get rebaptized and whatever else will be required of him. I'm just not that close with Rose, and that is a very touchy subject that is bound to cause more harm than good. Which is why I'm going to the bishop. And if he won't talk to Rose's current bishop, then maybe I will.

Again, this has nothing to do with judging between good and evil. I don't believe that Rose is a bad person. I believe that Rose is a confused, scared young man who probably has almost worthy dreams of becoming a typical LDS housewife, and is willing to do whatever it takes to reach that goal.

Poor Rose.

In all of these cases, I don't believe that it's my place to decide what sort of punishment should be doled out. But I do believe that it is among the duties of a friend to offer advice. That doesn't always have to be the green light. A real friend will tell you when to hit the brakes, when you're going too far. You'd expect the good friend to pull you aside and tell you when you were about to go outside with your fly down, when you are too drunk to drive home, when you're about to rush into a marriage that you think will cure your homosexuality....

I stand by what I said in the post. Ideally we wouldn't have to be Paula OR Simon; we could each be creatures of balanced niceness and helpfulness, but in a valley so inundated with unhelpful but nice Paulas, I'll do my part to bringing balance and be a helpful Simon. Being a friend is not about saying what people want to hear. Like you did with your comment, Pinetree. It's made me reconsider, and though I haven't come to agree with you, I'm glad you felt close enough to tell me what you think.

There was a woman on American Idol a few weeks back who had quit her job to come on the show. And then she was awful. Simon told her she was awful, and then called her boss and personally asked the manager to rehire the lady, telling her the woman was very personable and a great salesperson, but she was a very terrible singer. That's what I'm talking about here with the Simon thing. Not deciding she's a bad person. Just that she's a bad singer. And my question is this: Why didn't ANY of her friends ever tell her she wasn't that good at singing? WHY!? What kind of friend lets you quit your job like that? That's a very bad friend.

I think I can do better than that.

Pinetree, while I disagree with your points, I'm glad we can even have these discussions. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but I don't do middle so well, so for now I'm sticking to my extreme side, until I can find a way to get extreme balance. Love ya much.

--Snappy Smurf

Masquerade

"Paper faces on parade/ Masquerade/ Hide your face so the world will never find you."

Last Saturday, my new friend Snake and I went to a masquerade. We got masks at the local costume shop, and I wore my camel-colored leisure suit and my Guido wig, as well. I don't think I knew anyone there besides Snake, but we just danced and pretended we were the most interesting people in the room, and we had a good time. It was a bit freaky, all the masks and color and movement. Like the masquerade on Labyrinth, except without David Bowie sexually singing to a 15-year old girl with sleeves on her princess dress that would prevent her from drowning should she fall unconscious into a lake.

Earlier that morning, Wiggle, Blueshorts, and I went to a different kind of... well, let me back up a bit:

My friend (we'll call him "Hamster" to protect his true identity) had just recently moved to Utah from back home. I knew him in my singles' ward there in California. I had recently learned from a mutual acquaintance that Hamster a) had moved to Provo and b) also deals with Same-Sex Attraction (i.e. he likes boys).

I thought this was pretty funny. I called him up and hung out with him a few times. We met up again at Evergreen, actually, and we played games and caught up and laughed about our mutual plights. During Christmas break, I went with Hamster to his roommate's parents' house in West Valley. Things were great. During our time there, Hamster announced that he was dating his roommate's old high school friend, whom we'll call Gladys because I feel like it. The roommate (Roo) was a bit disturbed by the situation, but seemed to be in good spirits. Indeed, they made an odd couple, as the lady was taller and of a much more substantial girth than the fellow. She pretty much equals three of him.

The following week was a momentous one. During the first few days of their boyfriend-girlfriendhood, Hamster and his roommate Roo got it on. Yes, friends, they crossed that bold line between "appropriate levels of physical attraction between roommates" and "sex."

This was most unfortunate and unsettling for me, because Hamster actually kinda resembles a rodent, and I was really grossed out by the notion. Hamster told Gladys immediately the next morning about what had happened between him and his roommate, and she was forgiving.

Later that week, Hamster reported to me that his girlfriend was feeling bad because he and she had "gone too far" the previous night. The next day they were engaged for this coming April.

A week or so later, the wedding was pushed up to last Saturday. I got my wedding invitation through Myspace: "Come if you want. If not, we're still doing it."

Doing what? one has to wonder....

Anyway, I rounded up the troops and Wiggle and Blushorts and I headed to the wedding. We were a bit curious as to whether the debacle would still be going on, since we hadn't actually heard anything since the Myspace invitation. But when we got to the Orem Institute of Religion, the ceremony was in full swing, and one of their mothers was up there saying how proud she was of the two.

Then the bishop got up and offered generic advice that I'd heard countless times in marriage prep at institute. Then they had the ceremony. The bride was dressed in cream. The bottom of the dress puffed way out, which made her torso look like the fake bride atop a huge delicious champagne-colored wedding cake. Also, I hadn't had breakfast before I went.

The bishop told them to take each other by the right hand, but I think the bride heard "Take his hand with your right hand," because she grabbed his left and pulled him over to where they were to stand.

The ceremony itself was interesting because we were all leaning forward in our pews, wondering whether anyone would object or whether we'd all have to forever hold our peace.

Well, they skipped that part of the ceremony, which is lucky, because I don't think I'd be allowed to rail on the wedding if they'd said it. We all tensed up again when it came time for them to say "I do," but I was pretty sure he wouldn't back out at the last second, because she could totally beat him up. They were pronounced mammal and wife, and the bride leaned all the way in and kissed him. That kiss, to me, was a foreshadow of the remainder of their marriage, with her constantly putting in the effort and keeping up appearances and strong-arming her way through dismal months or maybe even years until finally she realizes she is suffocating and pulls away.

After the ceremony, they were allowed to say words from the pulpit. Gladys went first, and announced that she was glad that her newly acquired husband didn't have car insurance. She explained in a forward and engaging way that shortly after Hamster had moved here, he had crashed his car into someone else's car. She told us that Hamster had needed a ride to court, and explicated the miracle that occurred when the judge gave him a lower fine than those which he'd given all the other violators present that morning. After that, they'd gone to Taco Bell, and that was their first date. The hand of the Lord, she said, had been in everything they'd done that led them to this point. Good thing Jesus took away that kid's insurance, huh? And I'm not even going to touch the fact that the bride wasn't in white. She ended by saying to the audience, "I love him more than I've ever loved anything else." It's really sad because when I look at this kid, I think, there's something not quite human about this kid. He really looks like someone took a man and started turning him into a naked mole rat and then just stopped part of the way through the transformation. And then she had to go and say "anyTHING." Not "anyONE."

So then the groom spoke. The little fellow looked so happy up there. There was more joy in him than his tiny frame could contain. He kept saying "these past few weeks," as an awkward reminder to everyone that the couple had only been dating for a month and engaged for a little under three weeks. When he was done speaking, there was another all-her kiss, and then there was a closing prayer and it was all over. All over.

We talked to some of the other guests at the wedding. Everyone was dressed in their best Sunday smiles. We were all very polite and very "supportive." I don't know what it really means to be "supportive," but I've decided that in the church it means to show up, smile, and not mention the fact that somebody is making a very stupid and huge mistake with his or her life.

Wiggle wondered aloud on the way home whether any of Gladys' friends had even once pulled her aside and said, "Look, I think what you are doing might be a Very Terrible Mistake."

At any rate, they are married now. May they find peace and happiness and monogamy.

I do realize that today's post is a tad more sardonic and potentially hurtful than my normal posts. But there's this phenomenon I've recognized here. I call it "the Provo Effect," and I used to think it was the greatest thing since Cap'n Crunch. But now I'm starting to wonder.

Here in Provo, you see, it doesn't matter what you do. As long as you act like you're supposed to be doing whatever it is you're doing, everyone else will act like that as well. If you just walk into a stranger's apartment, drink out of his milk carton, and change the channel on the TV, he will say "Hey, what's up?" and act as though he's the crazy one for either not remembering you or being offended by what you are doing. And seriously, you can get away with it. And yes, I do know this firsthand.

So naturally, when I moved to Provo, I took full advantage of this phenomenon. I would knock on random doors and ask the girls inside for dinner, and they would whip something up, or give me the leftover pie from last night. I came to realize that the film Ocean's 11 wasn't exaggerating when it had the Mormon Twins tell Saul, the old con artist, "I think you should try Provo. I think you could do very well there."

But soon I started to see the downside. Have you ever watched American Idol during the tryout phase, and been like, "Why on EARTH do these wretched people think they can sing?" Well, the answer is, the Provo effect. Nobody is going to be the one to tell you that you can't sing, especially if you always sing with "self confidence" (a subject for a different rant). If you're a terrible singer but you sing all the time, and then you go up to your boss and say, "I'm quitting my job and I'm going to go make a fortune on American Idol," your boss is going to say, "Oh! I think you'll do great!" because first, nobody, even bosses, likes to be the one to tell you that what you are doing is not okay with the rest of the world, and second, at least now the office will be quiet enough to hear the Muzak playing overhead.

The world hates Simon Cowell, but really it should hate all the Paula Abduls out there who only hinder people's progression by never giving them the feedback that they need. In the name of being "nice," we are being dishonest, and it has to stop.

One day Heather Angela Hicks (she was still heather Angela Hawks back then) got a pink mohawk and spiked it up all crazy for church. I had been telling Heather from the moment she got the mohawk that I thought it looked terrible and trashy. And it really did. But after church, she was pleased to report that several of the sisters in the relief society had complimented her on her nice new mohawk. That's when it hit me. The Provo Effect was exactly the same thing as the Emperor's New Clothes Syndrome. And we're letting our emperors parade around naked!

Maybe all the people who have a proper sense of decency assume that the rest of us do, too. Let me assure you, though, that there are plenty of us who check the propriety of our actions against the reactions of those around us, like a sort of prosthetic conscience. Your failure to react genuinely does us a great disservice. Not that I'm trying to lay the blame for my own misdeeds on someone else. It's just that I think people care about what everyone thinks a little more than any of us lets on, and so it's time for us all to feel responsible for the opinions we share.

Instead of, "Oh, I like your hair," you can say, "Oh, I notice you got a new mohawk. Not something I would ever wear to church, but if it helps your sense of self worth, then I suppose it's a good thing." That comment, after about fifty repetitions from various members of the relief society, is going to send a message about the ridiculousness of the stupid haircut.

Hamster's wedding was the nadir of this effect. The event was the real masquerade of the day, with all of the guests hiding their true faces and feelings and putting on a facade of grotesquely exaggerated smiles. As long as nobody at the party shows his true face, nobody can be held responsible for the resulting tragedy, right?

Now, Hamster's wedding scared me for another reason, as well. Here he seems to have found what we all seem to be looking for (on paper, at least): a girl who proclaims to believe in the gospel and forgiveness and repentance and who is willing to overlook our shortcomings and marry us anyway. But any closer look will reveal that that is merely the facade; it's the lie hamster is telling himself. These two young people are in absolute denial about their future. They seem to believe in an impossible life in which they can merely divorce themselves from their feelings and breezily forgive away any trespasses against them.

Recent studies have shown that a large percentage of gay-straight marriages fail. Psychologists maintain that the only chance such a relationship really stands is through an incredible amount of communication between husband and wife. Well, Hamster and Gladys do seem to be able to communicate with each other. She was well aware of his indiscretions when they united in matrimony. My fear is that neither is really communicating with himself. Hamster is a fool to think that marriage will be his Pool of Bethesda. An optimistic, pathetic fool, whom I pity and understand, but a fool nonetheless. And Gladys is likewise a fool to think she can strong-arm him from place to place in the marriage, just as she did at the wedding, for the rest of their lives. She is going to squish the li'l fellow.

I hope that the mere fact that I can recognize the flaws in their thinking will prevent my making a similar mistake. I hope that someday I will find a virtuous woman who does have the capacity to love me and forgive me through all of my shortcomings, but at the same time will have a sense of her own worth and who will hold me to a higher standard of behavior rather than just continue to increase her tolerance of my misdeeds.

I wish that were the end of the post, but there's always another chapter to my stories, as Pinetree can attest after his on-campus run-in with (and run-off without) the Latina chick whose roommate had tried to get me to set the two up.

All that aside, though, I got an e-mail from Rose today. You remember Rose, right? The transvestite from my ward who got baptized while I was at efy? Click here for the story. Click here for her Myspace, including more pics if you log in. Well, she's getting married in April. To the boy she was dating right after her baptism several months ago. And she says she's saving me a spot in the temple. Of course, this puts me in the rather uncomfortable position of possibly being the only one to attend the wedding who knows that she is, in actuality, a "he." So I have set another appointment with the Bishop and I will be taking him the evidence that Heather Angela Hicks was smart enough to photocopy, and I will ask him what he thinks I should do.

This could easily be another wedding where I sit there with my mouth shut and say nothing. Just watch the embers fall and sit there, smugly reassured that I'm not the one responsible for the fire. But maybe it's time to be Simon, not Paula, and to call the disaster where I see it.

Sharkbite asked why I even attended Hamster's wedding at all. I told him that if there's a train wreck on the side of the road, you can't just drive by and not turn your head to look. Then again, I'm starting to realize that sometimes an emperor can parade by naked, and you really can just clamp your mouth shut and pretend not to see. Not everyone in the crowd believed the tailors and their nonsense about not being fit for our station, I've learned. Half of us are just clenching our teeth, hoping some kid will say what we aren't willing to stick our necks out to say ourselves. Oh, well. The first resplendent ruler, in all his glorious déshabillé, is gone, the next approaches, and all I can do is hope that at the end of the parade, there is Santa, and he's throwing candy.

Looking Up

Ok, so I have not felt like blogging at all lately. So to make up for it, this is going to be the mother of all blog entries, full of anecdotes and philosophy and a road trip and links and pictures. Seriously, this blog entry is going to start giving birth to other blog entries. I hope you can appreciate this.

Some people who call themselves the Provo Late Knights came upon my confessions blog and invited me to join their ranks. My friend Ryan from efy is in the group, and he vouched for me, so they let me in. What they do is make movies, which you can see here if you have Quicktime 7 (which comes with iTunes). They are mockumentaries about life in Provo after midnight. We filmed one last week that introduced me as their nemesis, but you will have to wait a week or so before they get it all edited. I'm excited for the release, and also to start writing the next one.

Ryan also invited me to the Sundance film festival with him and some cool friends from his ward. We saw Gwyneth Paltrow. I was surprised that she is actually a lot more beautiful than normal people. It was weird. I'd always assumed that movie stars would look less glamorous in person, but not so. We saw seven short films (one of which was Gwyneth's directorial debut), and then they had a Q&A session afterward with all the directors. I asked a question about the lighting to one of the other directors, whose film was better than Gwyneth's, and wasn't funded by Vogue Magazine. We also had some delicious pizza. Man, that was some good stuff. Ryan is a really superior person. He has been going through some tough times lately with the passing on of our mutual friend Carly, but in my own times of turmoil I have really appreciated his involving me in his life. He's a good friend.


My choir went to St. George last weekend. It was such a great experience. We went and saw the new Joseph Smith movie that replaced Testaments. That movie is the best the church has ever produced. I cried through the whole thing. I want to go see it again. Anyone who reads this and is close enough to Salt Lake City or St. George to go watch it, please do. It will change you. Also, I became pretty good buddies with my friend Brett, since we roomed together. The two of us had a great time with our car buddies, Shelley (my efy co-worker) and Jessica (went to Wicked with me). Our entire choir was more bonded afterward.


We had auditions after our concert this last week, and my friend Snake from the ward tried out, and he made it in. He won't be able to come to our Wednesday practices, so it's my job to tape record the practices and then do practice with him one-on-one at his house. I'm excited to work with him; he's a really great guy.

I asked a girl on four dates tonight. Her name is Natasha and she's in my ward. She's in a marriage prep class and has an assignment to go on four dates with the same person. She was telling me this while I was playing bartender at my friend Mike's birthday party, mixing her a drink (non-alcoholic, of course). So as I was leaving the party, I suavely said, "Hey, Natasha, if you need any help with your homework, just call me."

"Did you have a specific class in mind?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"OK! I'll call you."Her enthusiasm was accompanied by a warning that this is quite the commitment and might require a lot of work and planning and time. I guess there are some tough stipulations. Meh. She seems like a cool girl, and what the heck else am I going to do with my weekends?

Well, besides the fact that Kelly stopped me at church and asked if it would be all right if we went on the date she accidentally stood me up on before Christmas. So I'm also going to do that next week. I'll probably let you all know how it goes.

I ordered pizza from Little Caesar's today. 25 pizzas. They're for my ward skating party this Saturday. I'm excited for it.

I clipped my nails for like an hour on a bus ride last week. I got them all short and perfect. Now I have an ingrown pinky nail. I always wondered why you can't get an ingrown fingernail, but now I know that you can. It's starting to turn green and I keep bumping it on stuff. OOOOOWWWW!

There's a job fair I'm going to tomorrow. I need a new job. Desperately.

Tomorrow night after choir practice I'm going to go with my new friends Chris and Garrett to watch them film something. They're going to shout in the square on campus, things like "I'm wearing women's underwear" and "I don't wear deodorant." The thing is, they're two of my favorite people in this ward. Very intelligent and aware of people and of current events. I could see myself living with those two. They are really cool. I try to hang with them whenever we have big ward functions. Garrett is the one who wrote about my fireside in his blog. Chris has set up a website similar to the hundred hour board, only where anyone can answer, and he wants me to be the editor. He's going to set up advertisements, and I will get 50% of any profits he makes off of it. That's pretty exciting. Everyone go there and ask or answer questions, ok?

My friend Alex passed this website along. It's my new favorite website, and you all should check it out.

The Mermaid called me up out of the blue to tell me she wanted to go to Costco. We went. I bought cheese, ham and cereal. It was a much more pleasant experience than the time I only bought vinegar and chili. We had a good talk. She had just broken up with a boyfriend, and talked for a substantial amount of time about how she needs a boyfriend who is more concerned with being good than being cool, and someone who is not materialistic but is more free with his things. I just nodded and said yeah, I could see her with someone like that. The girl is beautiful, but I never know what to think with her. One would have to fend off many other guys to really have anything with her.

I doubt I'll ever get around to talking fully about our roadtrip, so here are several of my favorite pictures from that time:


Over here on the left is when I was pretending to be seasick on the ferry. We had lots of fun on that ride.



This is me, Pinetree, Blueshorts, and Keri on our way into Seattle on the ferry. Seattle is the coolest city! I love the puget sound, and even fell into it!



I couldn't stop laughing about this campfire. It took us about an hour to light it. There was so much wind it kept getting blown out. Lad and I had to hold that tarp while Pinetree went through about 100 matches trying to get it lit. It was great.



This was our breakfast the morning of camping. You can't exactly tell, but we're on a cliff facing the ocean. It was a beautiful morning.




And here is my good buddy Pinetree playing on the beach at sunset. I didn't touch up this picture at all. Isn't it beautiful?






This is me being all contemplative at the same sunset a few minutes earlier. That has to be the most beautiful sunset I've ever seen. This was at Ocean Beach in San Francisco.




Pinetree again. This thing just got prettier and prettier.








That's me on the left and Pinetree on the right. I got kinda wet out there, but it was so worth it for these pictures, I think.





I loved how far out one could run on that beach. The tide was very low.










My dad sent me a coherent e-mail. It was the most lucid he's been in months. He said he printed out a copy of the letter I sent him and keeps it on him always. He says this is his new lease on life. I hope he takes full advantage of it. Thanks to those who have been praying for both of us.

I had a great talk with my bishop on Sunday for an hour and twenty minutes. I went in there to talk to him about my Dad and my hellish nightmares and my general ennui. He told me I might be depressed. I said I'd always been a very happy person. He said, "Well, yesterday I went to a seminar and it had three parts. first, we learned about homosexuality. Second, we learned about pornography. And third, we learned about depression. And the doctor who talked to us told us that there are two types of depression. Chemical depression, and then depression that is brought on by a trauma."

Well, I thought that was an interesting little preface. If you're new to reading my blog and haven't read all the archives, you might want to click here before you keep reading today's post, or you'll be like, WTF?

Anyway, it was interesting because I realized that the bishop was right. I have been suffering from depression. Not any permanent kind, but one I really need to work through. I also talked to him about the unfairness of things, that my dad can make bad decisions and in the end, I understand that he needs to be punished, but how could a loving God allow those of us who live righteously to be deprived of the ones we love because of the bad choices they make? The bishop told me a story that was the flip side of that, about how when he was twenty-nine, he almost left the church, but decided in the end to stick with it. And then recently one of his older children approached him and said that he was so grateful for the decision his dad made to stay in the church, because think of all the progeny that would be affected. And then suddenly I saw how it IS fair. That if we weren't allowed to have a negative impact on other people, we wouldn't be able to have a positive one, either.

I had gone to speak to the bishop with my perennial concerns about failure. I had been afraid to get close to people because I knew the bad choices I might some day make would eventually leave anyone I loved in a lot of pain they didn't deserve. But the bishop helped me to see that on the other hand, my failure to grow close to someone would deprive them of all the joy I could bring, and that in the end it's only a matter of personal choice and application of the atonement of Christ that will determine whether I'll bring more sorrow or joy into others' lives. So my new goal is to do good, to be proactive in helping others and focusing on their needs rather than trying to sort out my own life before I can begin to focus on anyone else. Because it won't happen that way.

Then I got around to that other topic. That whole "same-sex attraction" thing, to borrow the church's euphemism. I really hadn't planned to talk about it, but since he brought it up....

The bishop was incredibly informed. He had done a lot of praying and soul searching in the twenty-four hours since he had been to the seminar. He said that he's recently been dealing with another young man in my situation, and hadn't known what to tell him. He inspired me with his confidence in my ability to make good decisions. He astonished me with his perceptiveness into my character, and his compassion for my plight. And he gave me a paper to read. By a Dr. Jeff Robinson.

Dr. Robinson is a devout Latter-Day Saint psycho-therapist who has counseled innumerable young men and women who struggle with same-sex attraction. The paper the bishop gave me was in actuality a transcript of a discourse he had presented to a similar group of bishops a few years ago. The following is my own summary of that paper. It's not intended to be a condensed version of his work, but rather a showcase of the points I found most relevant to me.

The good doctor has found three characteristics that virtually all of his subjects have in common. First, they are highly emotionally sensitive. Second, they are above average in their intelligence and introspection. And third, they have an acute sense of right and wrong and a compulsion to do right. Check, check check, all of my gay friends who read this just went in their heads.

So, Dr. Robinson has this theory. He asserts that you take a young man with these three qualities, and you stick him in a society that teaches him to avoid sexualizing women, and he will build up protective walls against the future likelihood of that ever happening. Meanwhile, because of his emotional sensitivity, he begins to feel different from other boys. He wants to be rough-and-tumble, to be admired by the other children for his prowess, but begins to realize (and resent) that his strengths lie in other areas. Still, he watches those boys who represent what he wishes he were.

Then puberty strikes. And boys are aroused for the next several years. Pants too tight? Aroused. Pants too loose? Aroused. Bumpy car ride? Aroused. The boy walks around aroused by everything in his environment.

Now, the "normal" boy, because of social messages he's received, and because he is captivated by the differences between them and himself, begins to dwell on the female body, and it becomes directly linked to his sexuality.

For an example of how much the societal influences affect our sexuality, Dr. Robinson points out that in some African cultures, fat women are attractive. In others, women are more sexually attractive to men if they are missing their front teeth, if they have their necks stretched out by rings, or if their earlobes are pulled down to their lips. Obviously, sexuality is influenced a lot more than we like to think by what our society teaches us.

For this exceptional boy, something goes askew at this juncture. Because of the messages he's received from society, he is not letting himself dwell at all on the female body. And because of the differences between himself and other boys, he is fixated on them at this point in his life where things are becoming sexual. His body learns to have sexual responses to males instead of females.

Now, of course, he doesn't want this to happen. But the moment he notices that it's happening and labels it, he's cementing it. "Oh, no. I'm gay. I'm gay. I'm gay."

If this were a wound, contends Dr. Robinson, we would give it time to heal on its own. If it were a disease we could medicate it. If it were a syndrome we would seek treatment. But it's not those things. It's something we've learned. To get rid of it would be like his saying "Rudolph the red-nosed" without your thinking "reindeer." Your brain has learned that and that's what it's going to keep doing.

That doesn't mean it's impossible. If you did want to stop thinking "reindeer," you would have to replace it with something else. So you might try to say "Rudolph the red-nosed buffalo." Repeat five thousand times.

Now here's the problem with these introspective, hyper-sensitive, highly intelligent, perfectionist boys: "buffalo. buffalo. buffalo. buffalo. buffalo. reindeer. Oh, crap! I just said reindeer again! I always say reindeer! I guess I'm just a reindeer person! I'll always be stuck on reindeer!" And now he just said "reindeer" lots of extra times.

What he should say is "buffalo. buffalo. buffalo. reindeer. oh, I used to say that a lot. buffalo. buffalo." The more he kicks against it, the more it has hold over him, like the man struggling to his death in quicksand.

Dr. Robinson says that most of the young men who come to see him approach their homosexual attractions like a knight approaches a dragon. They think they need to charge the dragon, exchange blows, get a bit scorched, but in the end, though they lie bleeding, singed, and muddy, the dragon will be vanquished and they will be alive to tell of it. The reality is that the best way to deal with this dragon is just to fend it off, retreat a step, keep that shield up, step back again, and again, and again, until you're far enough away that you can just turn your back on the dragon and walk away. He'll probably always be a speck on the horizon, but he'll no longer be a nuisance.

The conclusion Dr. Robinson's speech brought tears to my eyes. He says he tells his patients that if he had a pill in his cabinet that would cure them of homosexuality, he wouldn't give it to them. When they invariably ask why not, he tells them that he's sure Heavenly Father has just such a pill, and that he's sure they've asked for it, and that He's always said no. He said that in the end it would be this struggle that would help us to reach exaltation. That these young men are the sort that he feels would fall to pride without this burden to anchor them down, that they would be the very ones to do great things to the point where they wouldn't feel a need to use the atonement, and that Satan targets them precisely because of all the potential they have to do good. And he also asserts that we can still do that good, if we can learn to walk away from the dragon.

The bishop is going to talk to Dr. Robinson to try to arrange for me to meet with him. I am so excited. I feel he really understands these issues, and can really help me in my own quest to do what's right.

I read the paper in the bathroom right before my shower yesterday. Then I had to run out for FHE (Sharkbite was like, "Smurf! Shoes and socks now!" Funny how my FHE dad sounds just like my real parents two decades before) , and I accidentally left the paper on the back of the toilet. I went and watched 24 with Kip and Wiggle and Jessica after that, and half-way through I remembered the paper and could think of nothing else. When I got back, Sharkbite was the only one home. He talked with me about all the normal things (politics, women, why he doesn't fit in), and when I finally found a covert moment to nip into the bathroom to retrieve the discourse, I found that it was gone. Awkward. I have no idea what he would have done with it, what he might have thought of it, or why he would filch it, but oh, well. Maybe it's something he needs more than I do. HA!

Ok, I'm going to finish this beast off with some pictures of my choir trip. Hope you enjoy!


This is Shelley beating me at air hockey. I had to whip off my tie in the middle of the game, and Jessica said it was the sexiest thing she'd ever seen me do, so I did it several times. We got in trouble for taking pictures in here.





Here's me eating chinese food. Did you know I once went several months without using a fork? Chopsticks only for me, thank you. For everything from steak to macaroni and cheese. I love chop sticks. I was posing for the picture, by the way. I don't really eat like that. Embarassing!







<<-----Over here you can see the courtyard of my friend Tara's house. The place was beautiful! This is where all the girls from the choir stayed.


And here----->>
you can see the living room. The view was incredible, but the place didn't really feel like one you could live in.




At the outlet mall, we were really bored, so Shelley and I got some sidewalk chalk and a bouncy ball at KB Toys and started a rockin' game of four square. Shelley kept hitting strangers. This was yet another opportunity to whip my tie off all seductively.





This is me and Shelley pretending we play the piano.









Here's me and Jessica. Shelley took this picture because we looked like an old married couple in it. I'm in the T-shirt because my neck got really terribly painful burns on it from whipping my tie off so many times. TOO sexy! TOO sexy!


Tara's mom had me peel the tomatoes for the guacamole, so I put on a little cooking show for the choir members. They said aloud what they thought I was thinking, as well as the thoughts of the tomatoes. From left to right we have Brett, Lisa, Married Brett, Treanna, and Ryan.



And finally, no, that is not a dead marmot on that woman's head. It is her actual hair, and I hate it. And also I love it. Shelley and Jessica had to take the picture with this woman in the background at the assisted living center just so we would could look at it whenever we want. Thank you, ladies. I hope you all love and hate it as much as I do.