My sister Melanie asked me for advice on starting a blog like a year ago. It's a good thing she didn't ask for advice on making a popular blog, because I couldn't have helped her with that. But it looks like she now has a blog with two posts. It's called "Almost Canadian," an obvious reference to us growing up half an hour from the border of Quebec and watching CBC instead of PBS. If you enjoy my sarcasm, snark, anger, and scathing religious and political criticism, I don't think you'll get any of that from her. But she has a strong writing voice and a charming sense of humor. I think she's a better writer than I was at her age (23), even though she only just recently realized it's what she wants to do, but I'm not jealous or anything. Okay, maybe a little. I'm just going to focus on building up my relationship with her in case she gets rich before I do.
I read a few Psychology Today articles about near-death experiences yesterday. NDEs have increased dramatically since the mid-twentieth century as medical technology has advanced to be able to save people who are farther and farther gone. They confirm of one of two things: that our consciousnesses will survive death, or that spiritual experiences are a byproduct of our brains having evolved to screw with us in countless ways. Obviously one of these possibilities is comforting and the other is terrifying. I'm guessing NDEs were all but nonexistent for most of human history when people simply did not wake up after their hearts stopped, so I doubt they influenced religious beliefs. But are they evidence for religious beliefs or merely influenced by them? Many of their motifs are strikingly similar across cultures, but Hindus don't encounter Jesus and Christians don't encounter Hindu gods. So maybe a biological commonality of human brains is being filtered through cultural influences, or maybe the higher power that receives dead souls is manifesting itself in different ways depending on what people expect and recognize. Many, maybe most neurologists and other scientists are skeptical. One hypothesis holds that NDEs are hallucinations caused by dying brains flooding themselves with the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine, but there is as yet little evidence that dying brains actually flood themselves with the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine. I should think that would be an easy thing to check for, but I'm no expert. Another, in my opinion more convincing, argument against the reality of NDEs is that similar experiences can be triggered by non-life-threatening conditions like fever or anesthesia. I'm not sure how a believer would respond to that, but any honest believer in any spiritual phenomena must be compelled to acknowledge that they have a significant neurological component and consequently can be set off by things happening in the brain. Hippies have recognized this for a long time. Why God would make spiritual phenomena so unstable and unreliable if they're meant to be a guide to divine truth, I can't imagine. One of the biggest counterarguments in favor of the reality of NDEs is the profound effect they tend to have on people. Most people find NDEs very peaceful and pleasant, sometimes so much so that coming back to life is a disappointment. They lose any fear of death they previously had, feel more purpose in life, see more beauty in everyday things, and become less materialistic and more altruistic. Standard hallucinations don't do that to people. I find this point very compelling, though there's still a chance it could just be a twisted cosmic joke, like how the Book of Mormon has a real and powerful spiritual impact on many people despite being a nineteenth-century fraud. A small percentage of people have unpleasant, lonely, or frightening NDEs, and while this would be difficult to test scientifically and I don't want to make insensitive assumptions, I'm dying to know if they're bad people who have reason to fear God's judgment. It would make sense for them to be a small percentage because God is supposed to be merciful and I believe few people are truly evil in their hearts. Anyway, this is cool stuff, and though none of it is conclusive, it somewhat assuages my anxiety about death, at least until science marches on and ruins it for everyone.
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This week I read Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World. It's a book about the need for scientific literacy and skepticism, but it's not an anti-God or anti-religion book like the ones that became popular a few years later, so it's interesting how he tiptoes around the elephant in the room that much of what he says could be used against God and religion. He does get into a few religious topics like the efficacy of prayer and claimed sightings of the Virgin Mary and the torture and murder of innocent women accused of witchcraft, but mostly he debunks alien abductions and psychic powers and stuff. He spends a lot of time on aliens. I came to the same conclusions as him when I wrote a folklore paper about aliens for graduate school. I was trying to avoid the question of their veracity altogether, since it's irrelevant to their role in folklore, but I still couldn't avoid determining that they aren't visiting Earth, they aren't making crop circles, and they aren't kidnapping and raping people. Which is good. But these experiences are still very real to the people who imagine them, which is almost as scary and just as worthy of study.
It's very frightening to me - and I'm not just going off this one book, which reiterated and expanded on a lot of things I had already learned - how deceptive and unreliable our brains are, how prone they are to cognitive biases, logical fallacies, false memories, and straight-up hallucinations. It takes great effort and more education than most people ever get to disentangle oneself from all of this and strive for what one can only hope is something approaching an accurate understanding of the world. Humankind's inherent irrationality has, in my judgment, caused more persistent and widespread problems than evil itself. Frankly, it threatens my belief in God because I don't see what purpose he could have for making us this way. I don't think it was to make us trust in him instead of ourselves, because spiritual feelings and experiences seem to be the least reliable of all. That is, when they're being used as a guide to truth. Simply having spiritual reactions to things is harmless. Sagan's opinion of spirituality: "'Spirit' comes from the Latin word 'to breathe'. What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word 'spiritual' that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of science. On occasion, I will feel free to use the word. Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both." On life after death, he writes, "My parents died years ago. I was very close to them. I still miss them terribly. I know I always will. I long to believe that their essence, their personalities, what I loved so much about them, are - really and truly - still in existence somewhere. I wouldn't ask very much, just five or ten minutes a year, say, to tell them about their grandchildren, to catch them up on the latest news, to remind them that I love them. There's a part of me - no matter how childish it sounds - that wonders how they are. 'Is everything all right?' I want to ask. The last words I found myself saying to my father, at the moment of his death, were 'Take care'. "Sometimes I dream that I'm talking to my parents, and suddenly - still immersed in the dreamwork - I'm seized by the overpowering realization that they didn't really die, that it's all been some kind of horrible mistake. Why, here they are, alive and well, my father making wry jokes, my mother earnestly advising me to wear a muffler because the weather is chilly. When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there's something within me that's ready to believe in life after death. And it's not the least bit interested in whether there's any sober evidence for it." He then segues into debunking mediums who claim they can talk to the dead. He doesn't try to debunk the existence of an afterlife itself. Of course he couldn't, because at the time of writing he'd never been dead. But if one does exist, how could we know? Maybe he's been trying to tell us about it for years but he can't find a good medium to talk to because they're all frauds. I used to be so confident that I knew exactly what would happen to me after I died. I would be compensated for every injustice I ever suffered and enter into eternal happiness. Now I wonder if instead I'll just enter an eternal dreamless sleep. I wouldn't mind that, except that I'd never get to listen to music again or see anyone I love again. Sagan missed his parents. His wife, Ann Druyan, misses him. She has said, "When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me - it still sometimes happens - and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl." I thought about this when I recently watched a video clip of Russian soldiers committing one of their many war crimes, in this case executing a Ukrainian prisoner of war. It was a short clip. He calmly smoked a cigarette and then they shot him and he fell to the ground so fast it almost looked fake. Were all his memories, his personality, and the very core of his identity permanently erased from existence in that moment, faster than the blink of an eye? In another instance I read about, a Ukrainian soldier sacrificed himself to protect his son, also a soldier, from an artillery shell, but it exploded near their heads and his son died with him anyway. I think of all the premature and undeserved deaths, the heroic sacrifices and the cannon fodder and the murders and the diseases and so on, and I think what a sick cosmic joke it would be for all these people to be erased, and for any species to have evolved to the point of having these existential questions and fears in the first place. But then, people of one kind or another have been dying for hundreds of thousands of years longer than any religion that teaches an afterlife has existed. So we're in good company. I shouldn't spend too much effort fearing or resenting the most universal experience in the world. The only thing I would really need to worry about is the possibility that God exists but is not loving or good. Maybe I will be tormented for eternity for failing to discern the correct religion that God hid among a thousand other religions and/or for giving in to the sinful nature that God gave me. I don't care what anyone says, I don't deserve to be tormented for eternity. Maybe a decade at most. And I think a lot of my experience on this planet should count as time served. I've had a reddit account since I don't know when, but until the last few weeks I only used it once in a great while to speak up when I saw something egregiously stupid, so I ended up with negative "karma" from people downvoting my comments. But I got into the positive a few weeks ago and, as the designers obviously intended, it gave me a bit of a dopamine rush. Haha, I thought, I hope I don't get addicted to this feeling. Of course I did. Anyway, the other day I saw that bestselling fantasy author and Latter-day Saint Brandon Sanderson had done an AMA (Ask Me Anything) and I was very impressed with his most popular response to the most popular question, so I'm going to pass it along here and save myself some actual writing for today. The question was asked by someone calling themself RattusRattus: How do you feel about the fact that queer people are treated better in your novels than on the campus you teach at? How do you reconcile donating to a church that promotes purity culture, homophobia, and anti-Semitism with writing books for the general public? BYU is pretty awful to queer people. In the 1960s and 70s it conducted witch hunts against closeted gay students with the object of forcing them to undergo conversion therapy (which didn't and doesn't work) or leave the school. A couple years ago it removed a ban on "homosexual behavior" from its Honor Code mid-semester, then for two weeks told confused gay students that yes, they were now allowed to date and hold hands and kiss just like straight students do, before the church commissioner of education who apparently had been asleep for two weeks told them that no, they still can't. Many students felt that they had been tricked into coming out of the closet. Hence the semi-regular protests since then. Ignorant people often ask why they go to BYU in the first place, and the answers include but are not limited to family pressure, the cheap tuition for members of the church that owns it, and the fact that people in their late teens and early twenties are often still figuring out their sexuality in the first place. An entire tax-exempt charity, the OUT Foundation, exists just to help LGBTQ+ students escape from BYU. So anyway, Brandon responded in a livestream that was subsequently transcribed thus: Thank you for a bold but not insulting phrasing of that question. So the church’s general stance on LGBTQ people is not where I, as a liberal member of the church, would like it to be. That being said, I have faith in the church, I have had spiritual experiences, confirming to me that this is where God wants me and that God is real. This gives me so much to think about. I've recently become even more convinced by the movie Lightyear that neutral or positive portrayals of LGBTQ+ characters in media are essential. I thought the movie was pretty mediocre, but these people having aneurysms because two women in it love each other can get bent. Disney has produced scores upon scores of movies where men and women kiss each other (or men kiss unconscious women, or whatever). One same-sex couple is not "forcing their lifestyle down your throat." It is not "grooming your children." It frightens me that some grown adults in this day and age still believe their children will turn gay if they ever see anyone being gay. For heaven's sake, see a therapist if you're that insecure in your sexuality. I grew up with heterosexuality constantly being shoved in my face by all the straight people who flaunt their lifestyles without a second thought, and I still thought sex was gross from the moment I learned what it was. What these media portrayals actually strive to accomplish is to demonstrate that LGBTQ+ people are just normal people with the same hopes and dreams as anyone else, thus reducing prejudice and making LGBTQ+ children (and adults) hate themselves less. No one can make me believe that isn't a worthy goal. As an aspiring author myself, obviously not worthy to even mention myself in the same post as Brandon Sanderson, I never had much of an agenda to do this. My as-yet-unpublished novel references the same-sex relationships of a couple of very minor characters for no other reason than to acknowledge that this is a fact of the world now and in 2153 when it takes place. Just recently when I revised it yet again, I realized that my protagonist is a little bit bisexual. She's mostly into men but she flirts with women just because she can. I never planned for her to flirt with women. I don't even know how to flirt with women. She just went ahead and did it. Similarly, in a story that I wrote for a graduate school class and then incorporated into my thesis, the protagonist and her best friend developed a camaraderie that seemed like a bit more than just best friends, and the professor pointed it out, so I went ahead and made them lovers and barely had to change anything. It was neither essential to the story nor agenda-driven. It just happened because the characters wanted it to happen. So maybe I'll just continue along those lines in my writing career if I ever have one. Brandon's response went over well. HandOfMaradonny said: I'm just super impressed you answered and didn't ignore. Brandon later responded directly to the original asker of the question: Honestly, I'm really glad you asked this one. Wow. Brandon Sanderson wants to wrestle with difficult ideas, difficult questions, and his own internal inconsistencies. A mind after my own heart. I think I'm in love. RIP Brandi WeaverI went to a small school where everyone in grades 7-12 knew everyone else's first and last name. When Kyle Cootware died in a four-wheeler accident in 2009, everyone mourned. A palpable gloom engulfed the entire school building. College hasn't been like that. Through the years I read in the news that a student I never heard of had died in a bike accident, and that a couple of students I recognized but never met had died by suicide, and that someone a couple blocks from my apartment had been murdered by her ex-boyfriend. But there wasn't the same sense of community and the same universal mourning. So anyway, I didn't know Brandi Weaver particularly well and I'm afraid I don't have a lot to say about her, but I did know her a little and it is a bit jarring and sobering that she's suddenly gone from natural causes at such a young age. I think I was in ninth grade when I sat at the same lunch table as her. It's been so long that I don't even remember, but I remember that she was always nice to me. She was one of those older girls who treated me like I was super cool even though I was the biggest dork. She smiled and joked a lot and just seemed to have a great attitude toward life. My condolences to her family and especially to her fiancé and children.
Crisis struck last weekend. Prudence, which it runs out I am capable of possessing once in a while, dictates that for the time being I keep it to myself apart from a half dozen friends and all of my Fiction Writing classmates who deserved an excuse for why my second story is garbage compared to the first. For a few moments after seeing the news I never wanted to see, I tried to wrap my brain around the fact that my life and my faith were about to shatter beyond repair. Then I ran into my bedroom to pray but discovered that I couldn't speak. I tried to pray silently but discovered that I couldn't think. So my prayer was just Help me, help me, help me, help me, help me.
I reached out to this guy in the ward that I know a little bit for a priesthood blessing. I didn't want to be too much of a burden on the guys I usually ask. While waiting for him to get back to me and then waiting for him to arrive, I cooked a frozen pizza and force-fed myself half of it, despite my complete lack of appetite, because I was starving. I offered the rest to him when he arrived, and he said it would be a good idea to make himself eat, and he appeared to have an even harder time doing so than I did. He wasn't doing well. He asked if he could stick around for a while after the blessing so he didn't have to be home alone. He asked if I've ever had questions about my faith, and I outlined the most recent one in very vague terms. I didn't want to tell him about my situation because I just wanted comfort from the blessing; I didn't want to open the channels for advice that I wasn't ready to accept. And he gave me the shortest blessing I've ever gotten and I appreciated that. He cried afterward. I think it helped him more than me. So that was cool. I invited him to accompany me to Come Follow Me with people from the ward. While there, I went through mood swings and wasn't in hell the entire time. I sat there for half an hour while two girls and four guys discussed the proper care and washing of different kinds of hair, a topic that I found altogether uninteresting but still better than being home alone, and then as I was poised to go be home alone again some others arrived very late and we played Werewolf. I threw myself into it with gusto. When I figured out that my in-game lover was a werewolf, I protected her with as much zeal as I would a real-life lover who murdered people. When others falsely accused and killed me, I was only upset that it would lead to her death as well. I can be selfless like that. I didn't look forward to bedtime because past experience had given me some idea of what I was in for. I'd gotten the obligatory blessing, and I would pray, and I would get sufficiently calm and peaceful to fall asleep, and I would wake up an hour or two later in a cold sweat with my heart doing its best impression of the ungodly screaming over the bridge of Rammstein's creepy and inappropriate song "Mein Teil", and there would be no more calm or peace or sleeping for the remainder of the night. Well, I did wake up and fail to get back to sleep until the sun rose, but the rest didn't happen. I didn't feel good by any means, but I felt all right. I soon came to the realization that God was shielding me from the worst of the pain. And He continued to shield me throughout the week, and I thanked Him and prayed more and tried harder and got better. Wednesday morning I woke up from a nightmare that ruined most of my day, Thursday morning I woke up from a nightmare that ruined the next half hour, and Friday morning I woke up from a nightmare that I was able to put out of my mind right away. It's not like I'd never thought to pray for comfort before. I'd just rarely noticed any of this magnitude, no matter how hard I pleaded. I don't know what's so different this time, if the nature of the situation has made me more desperate or more deserving or what. I do know that whatever suffering remains is a part of life that I shouldn't try to avoid or expect to be exempted from. Now I feel like I'm in a good place where I haven't stopped hoping for and believing in one specific outcome based on God's previous communications to me no matter how unlikely it looks at the moment, but I'm also patient and trying to be open to any outcome and the necessary understanding that will come with it. I know, I hate having to be so vague too. I'm annoying myself. One thing I've consciously done to enhance this effect is listen to a playlist I started nearly two years ago, which has taken on ever greater significance. Sometimes, like in the mornings when I wake up feeling like a dead battery and vulnerable to all manner of negative emotions, songs like "Head Above Water" and "Echoes of Andromeda" and "Boasting" have returned to my head.
I canceled my Tuesday morning classes so I wouldn't have to get out of bed until I felt like it, which greatly disappointed my students, I bet.
My ex-neighbor and dear friend Steve drove up from Salt Lake on Monday evening. We talked a little about what happened, but mostly watched Disney+. We watched Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and then some of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons - "Bart Sells His Soul", "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace", "The Springfield Files", "Lisa the Skeptic", "Bart on the Road", and possibly another that I forget at the moment. He went home around noon on Tuesday, which I later realized was his birthday. He gave up a third of his birthday for me. And I couldn't believe it was two years to the day since we went to see Jojo Rabbit, aka one of the finest films ever made. Where does the time go? My classmate and colleague Kylie also offered to hang out, so after our class on Tuesday I went up to ask if she was still good to hang out that evening. As soon as I started to speak, she put her hand on mine, and I thought about how USU's sexual misconduct prevention trainings told us not to touch someone without permission, even though we know full well that's not how neurotypical people live their lives. And I thought about my old friend Bracelets who used to touch me on the shoulder a lot until she saw the Temple Grandin movie and decided I didn't want to be touched. And I thought about a girl in my ward who came up to give the closing prayer after I had spoken in sacrament meeting, and touched my knee as she walked by. I think, in fairness, that this isn't just about neurotypicals vs. autistics but about women vs. men. Because women are raised to be more affectionate and nurturing, I think they can touch men's hands or shoulders or knees without these automatically coming across as romantic or sexualized gestures, whereas the reverse is not true. I remembered when a friend in high school was crying about her grandmother dying, and I needed to comfort her but I didn't know what to do but I didn't want her to think I didn't care so I finally admitted, "I'm trying to decide if I should put my arm around you or not," and that made her laugh through her tears a little so I guess it was better than just putting my arm around her. Speaking of dead grandmothers, I was at the funeral of mine a couple months ago, seated right next to my grandfather, who howled with grief a couple of times. If ever there were appropriate contexts to touch someone without permission, these were them. And it was still hard, it still rebelled against my conditioning, to put my hand on his wrist. And then I felt awkward. Should I take it off now? What if he wants to move his arm? I'm not really letting him move his arm. I envied a little Kylie's ability to put her hand on mine all casual-like just because she knew I was having a rough time. I couldn't think of anything more exciting to do than watch a movie, but fortunately for me, Kylie hasn't seen any Star Wars except for Rogue One and both of SNL's Undercover Bosses skits with Kylo Ren, so I picked the original Star Wars movie to guarantee that I would get invited back at least eight more times. She observed that Darth Vader is a jerk for kidnapping his own daughter, that stormtroopers don't aim very well, and that the use of computers in warfare was a pretty new idea in 1977 and that's probably why the movie was so popular. After the next movie, she reiterated that Darth Vader is a jerk for strangling his own men, and also reflected on the lack of women and racial diversity that's been somewhat fixed in the more recent movies. She said Princess Leia is an interesting character - specifically, it's interesting that she's a strong character but she still has to be sexualized. I hate myself for using that word twice in one post. Anyway, Kylie wasn't judging; she said the movies were fair for their time. I should have apologized in advance for what happens to Leia in the next one. She made me watch the SNL skits, and I made her watch the Robot Chicken sketch that introduced the world to Gary the stormtrooper.
I also talked to my old friend Eliana on the phone a couple times, and the first conversation mostly turned into her complaining about the Church. Kylie has left the Church too, but we have nuanced and mutually respectful discussions about it, and I look forward to reading her folklore paper about how patriarchal blessings might have roots in the Smith family's fascination with folk magic. When Eliana left a couple years ago she still believed in the Book of Mormon and stuff but didn't trust the leadership because of their past mistakes and current LGBTQ policies. Now she sees nothing good, wholesome, or true in any of it. I didn't try to argue and I hoped that my listening allowed her to let off some steam. But I kind of wanted to ask, Can you live with yourself knowing that I'm still in the Church because of you? I used to tell her about all kinds of issues that bothered my testimony, and she was so chill about all of it and confident that the Church was where God wanted her to be. She was my anchor many times. You never can tell what the future holds, can you? Anyway, we don't talk much anymore but I appreciate that she's still there for me.
For Thanksgiving, I was going to visit a nearby great aunt whom I shamefully never visit because I'm always welcome but that means I have to kind of invite myself at any given time, but she got sick. So I went to my bishop's house. Although I haven't always cast him in the most flattering light, he is a great guy. I wish I could say the same about my last bishop. Some others from the ward also showed up, and someone else in the ward had a friend who wasn't in the ward but was going to come, but he went to the wrong house so we started without him. He showed up fifteen minutes in and guess what? He was one of my students. So he saw me without a mask on and sat right next to me and that's kind of funny, isn't it? I hope he didn't take it as a personal jab when I said that I like teaching college students because if they don't want to be there, they don't show up. Today I tried really hard to pay attention in church and be open to the Spirit, and I did pretty well. I didn't even close myself off when a couple of people in Elders' Quorum said a couple of things about gender roles that made me want to stab my eyes out. My maternal grandmother, Denece Jensen Brighton of Milo, Idaho, died Thursday morning. This post is not a cry for sympathy. I'm doing fine, and while of course I appreciate any and all condolences, I'm not soliciting them. But I have to write the post because she was my grandmother and that's kind of a big deal. It would be rather bratty for me to write my weekly post about something else. It had been less than five and a half years since her father, Russell Jensen, my final living great-grandparent, died at 94. Both of them were preceded in death by two of her younger siblings, Russell "Arlen" Jensen and Necia Jensen Hartgrave, each in their late fifties. Only her brother Dane remains of that immediate family. What a sobering realization that must be for him. At 73, she was still not terribly old by today's standards, and I would have expected her to stick around a lot longer if she hadn't been experiencing so many health problems in the last couple years. She was the closest to me of all the people who have died in my entire life so far, and as such her death seems to herald a new phase of said life. First the great-grandparents, then the grandparents, then the parents and aunts and uncles - though of course, any number of things could happen to mix up that order, and I don't really expect to outlive my parents anyway.
I'm doing fine. I'm not afraid of death. I probably don't even take it as seriously as I should. I know it's just a step in God's plan, a temporary transition to another plane of existence, and in my mind, the choice between making that transition and continuing to suffer in mortality is a no-brainer. I don't ever want to be in my seventies having brain aneurysms and liver cancer and whatever. It will just feel weird to not see her again for a long time. Growing up in New York I saw her for a week or two every other year, and of course since moving to Utah I've seen her rather more often. It feels weird already to think about her being dead. Maybe it hasn't sunk in yet. I am a little sad that she didn't live long enough to see me accomplish anything, but maybe that's a selfish perspective. I last saw her at my sister's wedding in May. She won't be at my wedding. Not in the flesh, anyway. Last night I ran through her voice, her mannerisms, her laugh - no particular memory stands out that I feel like writing about at length here, but I tried to keep the whole person in my mind. Yes, there is the usual guilt that I should have talked to her more often while she was alive. I don't talk much to my family members. It's just how I am. I do my own thing and they do their own things. When my sister called me on Thursday, my first guess was that somebody had died because she never calls me and I never call her. But that doesn't mean we don't love each other. I really don't know what else to say. My brain isn't functioning well this weekend. Yesterday I had plenty of graduate school stuff to do but instead wasted the whole day doing virtually nothing because I had no focus or motivation, and I hate myself for it. I'm really not able to give a fitting tribute to my grandmother at this time. We'll see if anything else comes out after the funeral next weekend. |
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- Amelia Whitlock "I don't know how well you know Christopher Randall Nicholson, but... he's trolling. You should read his blog. It's delightful." - David Young About the AuthorC. Randall Nicholson is a white cisgender Christian male, so you can hate him without guilt, but he's also autistic and asexual, so you can't, unless you're an anti-vaxxer, in which case the feeling is mutual. This blog is where he periodically rants about life, the universe, and/or everything. Archives
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