The American Psychological Association recently made official its pre-existing opposition to hitting children, colloquially known as "spanking", as a form of discipline. This is a long overdue move considering that the adverse affects of spanking have been known for some time and this institution is kind of a big deal in the world of psychological stuff, but perhaps also a futile move because people will believe what they want to believe regardless. The more experts reach a consensus on something, the deeper the conspiracy runs, am I right? The science is settled on vaccines and evolution, but that hasn't stopped nobodies with no credentials from fabricating asinine debates that shouldn't exist. And the same is true here.

A few months ago, some Facebook page I forget and don't care the name of shared a story about a father who got arrested for hitting his daughter too hard. I said spanking should be illegal (which it is in at least thirty countries, but I meant in the United States) and posted the most recent study I was aware of. Exactly twenty parents responded to mock me with brilliant retorts like "You are completely wrong!" and "Pure baloney!" and "Sounds like you should have been spanked!" I mean, I don't know for a fact that they were all parents - unlike some of the creepy people I argue with, I have no desire to stalk people's profiles for things to use against them - but it seems more than likely, and my heart breaks for all children who have the misfortune of being born to or adopted by such imbeciles. It really is amazing how defensive so-called adults can get about what they think is their God-given right to hit children. You'd think I had threatened to take away their guns. I suppose that when their children develop mental health issues, they'll just blame vaccines.

​The closest thing to an intelligent response - and I'm not saying it was an intelligent response, because it wasn't, but it was closer than any of the others, which isn't saying much at all - was some guy calmly explaining that he doesn't trust science because he thinks that scientists just choose what they want to believe and cherry-pick evidence to support it. First of all, it would be nice if we could stop everyone who claims to not trust science from reaping the benefits of it and see how quickly they change their tune. Second, this is a logical fallacy that does nothing to address the data. Third, it's absurdly hypocritical because what he accused scientists of doing is exactly what he and all proponents of spanking do. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. They start with their conclusion that hitting children is wholesome, beneficial and what have you, and once they've made up their minds no amount of actual facts matters. They cherry-pick the fact that they were spanked and they think they turned out fine. Frankly, the vast majority of people who say "I turned out fine" are the kind of people whom I would rather die than turn out like.

Another stupid and fallacious comment I saw recently: "If spanking doesn't work, why has the prison population skyrocketed since the 1970s?" Gee, I don't know. It couldn't possibly have anything at all to do with Richard Nixon's war on hippies and black people, I mean drugs. That would just be silly.

Also, something about how the APA is a "liberal" institution and can't be trusted because of their stance on transgenderism. Okay, sure, they're not infallible, and the labels and diagnoses we put on all these mental things are somewhat subjective and arbitrary and subject to change, but this is a slightly bigger deal than whether or not something is classified as a disorder. This is a decision based on the information that scientists have gathered by studying how spanked children and non-spanked children turn out over the course of their lifetimes. Unlike Andrew Wakefield, these are legitimate scientists doing legitimate studies. They don't make up their own facts. And frankly, it's just kind of a no-brainer that hitting someone much smaller than you doesn't tend to fill them with positive feelings or valuable life lessons, but that's none of my business.

Okay, so I should have waited longer before responding to these respondents, and taken the time to desensitize myself to these parents' soul-destroying level of stupidity, so that I wouldn't succumb to the temptation of telling them exactly what I thought of them. Barring that, I should have at least removed the phrase "take your heads out of your asses for a few minutes" from my explanation of why their asinine responses were deficient and made me lose brain cells. But I didn't. I'm working inconsistently and half-heartedly on being a nice person when I don't feel like it, but I'm still very deficient in that area and my motivation was kind of obliterated by the parasite who sucked more than five thousand dollars from me in two months and has paid back thirty cents in five months. If I had been mean to her in high school like everyone else, she wouldn't have asked me for anything in the first place, or if I had told her what she could go do instead of giving her any, she wouldn't have kept asking, right? Why would I want to ever be nice to anyone again? Um. Off-topic. Sorry.

Dear all parents of the United States and wherever else still has this problem,

You don't know everything. And that's okay. Nobody does and nobody expects you to. And for the most part, I would agree that your parenting tactics and whatever permanent psychological damage you inflict on your children are none of my business. Heck, you're even well within your rights to let them die from preventable diseases because you hate autistic people and worship one discredited doctor with one fraudulent study. Okay, that was sarcasm again. I can't help it. To reiterate the actual point: you don't know everything and that's not an accusation, just a fact.

However, if - and I realize I'm not referring to all of you here - you pretend that becoming a parent somehow magically downloads God's knowledge into your brain, that you're smarter than doctors and scientists in fields where you have approximately zero knowledge or experience, and that what you for some unclear and unhealthy reason desperately want to be true trumps actual observable facts, you shoot your credibility in the head and run it over with a steamroller. You broadcast to the world that you're a moron and proud of it. And your child(ren) suffer(s) the consequences.

Your opinions are not sacred because of your parenthood. They are not entitled to respect or deference just because they exist. They are not God's law just because your parents or grandparents held them too. They can be and sometimes are wrong. If you're an adult, you should be able to acknowledge this, change them, and move on with greater wisdom. You should be able to acknowledge and ignore your own confirmation bias instead of pretending that scientists and/or liberals are the only people who have it. Thinking is scary, yes, but you get used to it.

And while I'm at it, I'd like to apply this to politics as well. Several of my political opinions may be wrong, but I'm honest and willing to change them based on evidence. I don't hold one side of the spectrum to an impossible standard and ignore the other's deficiencies. If more Americans were honest like this, maybe our country wouldn't be in the proverbial toilet. I honestly believe that the two-party system is the biggest problem in our government today. George Washington, for all his white maleness and slave owning, warned us about it. Did we listen? No. That was stupid of us.

Sincerely,
Me

"​In terms of physical abuse, I have never accepted the principle of “spare the rod and spoil the child.” I will be forever grateful for a father who never laid a hand in anger upon his children. Somehow he had the wonderful talent to let them know what was expected of them and to give them encouragement in achieving it. I am persuaded that violent fathers produce violent sons. I am satisfied that such punishment in most instances does more damage than good. Children don’t need beating. They need love and encouragement. They need fathers to whom they can look with respect rather than fear. Above all, they need example." - Gordon B. Hinckley

​One group or other at USU recently had a night dedicated to a thing called "body image". What is body image? As far as I can tell, it's a specialized subset of another thing called "self-esteem", referring specifically to how people feel about their bodies. I went to this event because it had food, some healthy, some not so much. And also because this was a topic I didn't consider myself super knowledgeable about and I believe in educating myself and stuff. This will be a fun topic for me to write about and not strange or awkward at all.

What always gets overlooked in any discussion about human bodies, the proverbial elephant in the proverbial room, is the fact that all human bodies - male, female, intersex, black, white, orange, young, old, thin, fat, weak, muscular, healthy, diseased, or whatever - are fundamentally the same: disgusting beyond all reason. For real. I don't understand people who claim that learning about human anatomy strengthens their faith in God, because personally it makes me lean toward nihilism. Maybe at some point you get desensitized, but I'm nowhere near that point. A body is basically a mobile odor factory that doubles as a galaxy for bacteria. Even innocuous little things like vocal chords are unnecessarily gross. In one class or other I had to see footage of vocal chords doing "vocal fry", an obnoxious thing that every teenage girl in America does to make her voice sound obnoxious. I could have died happy without seeing that. And it wasn't just me, because most of the class let out noises of shock or revulsion. Humans are grubs. I just needed to get that off my chest and thanks for tolerating me.

The presenters showed us some videos geared toward women but stressed a couple times that their research has shown that men have just as many negative views of their own bodies. Eating disorders, however, remain a predominantly female phenomenon. They didn't address this apparent discrepancy. If I had to guess, I would say it's because our society teaches men from a young age that they're not supposed to have feelings, so they're more likely to repress and ignore their negative ones until they kill themselves. Something like 85% of eating disorders are among females and something like 75% of suicides are among males. Or maybe body image really doesn't bother men as much because they know women don't tend to be as visually stimulated anyway. (Please don't send me death threats for making that generalization.) Personally, I hate every part of myself except my beautiful eyes and average ears, but I don't worry about it very often. I just figure this piece of junk is what God gave me and there's nothing I can do about it, so why stress? Besides, I know it's really my voice, mannerisms, and personality that make me unattractive.

Somebody needs to do a study, though - and maybe we could redirect a few billion dollars from Trump's stupid stupid wall to this far more important endeavor - on whether California girls have higher self-esteem than other American girls because of the songs by the Beach Boys and Katy Perry. Really, when you think about it, the Beach Boys song is unnecessarily cruel. They could have just been like "This is our personal preference in girls", but no, they had to be like "The girls in every region of the United States besides California all have their own positive qualities, but they just aren't good enough and we wish they were different." Really. It's kind of awful when you think about it. The good news, however, is that being a true "California girl" is more a state of mind than a geographical designation. If you like sunshine, heavy taxes, and getting cancer from literally everything, then you too can be a California girl. Even if you're a boy. But that's just my mansplanation and it could be completely wrong.

The group discussed the phenomenon of movies and advertisements manipulating people to an impossible standard of beauty, again stressing that this is done to men as well as women, though again, I can see how it would have a more negative psychological impact on the latter. This is one of those things that I'm well aware of but get angry about all over again every time I'm reminded. What I wasn't aware of was that the manipulators will sometimes actually mix and match parts - eyes, arms, legs, whatever - from different people. Why do they do this? Because many consumers are stupid enough to buy products that are advertised with attractive people who have nothing to do with them, and to throw money at whatever sewage Hollywood wants to pour down their throats. I will say that while I think Rian Johnson is a godawful writer and Rose Tico is an annoying and preachy character, I respect his decision to turn her attractive actress into a frumpy-looking nerd on purpose. Most directors' idea of a frumpy-looking nerd is a hot girl with glasses. Rose, for all her deficiencies as a character, is a real person fawning over her celebrity crushes and that's awesome.

I will say that I don't believe everyone is beautiful, let alone equally beautiful. I think that's a load of crap. "Beauty", at least in the physical sense, refers to traits that most humans are programmed by millions of years of evolution to find attractive because they signal reproductive fitness. ("Cuteness", though sometimes used interchangeably and able to serve a similar purpose, refers to specific kinds of imperfection, e.g. a disproportionately large head, that are meant to signal helplessness and trigger instincts of care and protectiveness.) Preferences differ between individuals and across cultures, but the basics are pretty universal. Most of us at first glance find certain people more attractive than others, but most of us are woke enough to know that looks don't really matter, so in order to resolve our guilt we tell ourselves and each other that "everyone is beautiful". We all know on some level that this isn't true but we try not to think about it too much because then we would feel guilty for having evolutionary instincts.

What if, instead of repeating this lie, we taught our children from childhood up that everyone has the same intrinsic worth independent of what they look like, how they talk, how they dress, who they vote for, and so on? Of course, most parents are already trying to instill this value in their children, but obviously we as a nation and as a world need to do a much better job of it. Society is no help. While preaching out one side of its proverbial mouth that "everyone is beautiful", it does all this airbrushing and Photoshopping and objectification crap that broadcasts the insincerity of its first message to anyone with half a brain. We're supposed to believe that plain and ugly people don't exist, so this frees us to guiltlessly dehumanize them. There was a viral meme on Facebook a few years ago where jerks shared pictures of people that most of the human race would consider ugly with captions like "Will someone please tag so-and-so, he left his whatever at my place last night". I think most people who did this never realized how mean-spirited it was. News flash: most people in photographs on the internet are/were real people. Momo is an exception. Probably.

The societal hypocrisy was even apparent in one of the well-intentioned videos the presenters showed us. It was that video that went around Facebook a few years ago where this forensic artist asks women to describe themselves and then he asks other people to describe them and the pictures he draws from the latter descriptions are more attractive. Even though this video says that "You are more beautiful than you think you are", it implicitly affirms that some features and some people are less beautiful than others. The first pictures are clearly meant to be less beautiful than the second, but they still look like women. One woman says something about the size of her jaw, indicating that she has low self-esteem and sees this feature differently than other people, but this only matters if some jaws are less attractive than others. And we all know that they are. The world is horrifically unfair. But I believe it's almost always better to acknowledge harsh truths than tell ourselves comforting lies. We need to cope with life as it really is, or spend as much time as possible escaping from it into sci-fi and fantasy worlds like I do.

Speaking of women, a federal court recently noticed that requiring men to register for Selective Service in order to be granted rights that women are granted by turning eighteen is constitutionally indefensible. I think a perfect solution to this problem would be to abolish Selective Service, but nobody asked me, and it's more likely that within a few years women will be required to register and then get drafted when North Korea bombs us. So now conservatives are rhetorically asking, "Is this what you wanted, you stupid feminists?" and the feminists are like "Uh, yeah, actually it is, thanks." If I cared about the future of the human race, I would point out that males are much much more expendable from a reproductive standpoint and that sending a more or less equal number of females to their deaths in the event of war would not prove beneficial to our species or society in the long run, but what's the human race done for me lately?

In conclusion, God - whom I still believe even though the nightmare-inducing hideousness of His alleged greatest creation poses a significant challenge to my faith - loves you the same as everyone else no matter what you look like. He doesn't care what you look like really at all. "[T]he Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart."

Today, because it resonated with me I decided to share a lengthy Facebook post from Ben Schilaty that he shared from someone else and then offer my own commentary and make it about me.

My friend Blake shared an analogy that is so good I wish I’d come up with it. The following are Blake’s words:

I always appreciate when people ask me sincere questions about LGBTQ+ & SSA (same-sex attraction) topics.
I’m often asked the following question by straight people who are trying understand better:

“Why do LGBTQ+ people feel like they have to label themselves, “come out”, or talk about their experience with sexuality? I mean I don’t go around talking about my sexuality all the time.”

There are many ways to respond to this question, but sometimes I use the following metaphor (let’s just say I’m sharing this metaphor with a straight man):

“Okay, imagine that you wanted to get away… just take a vacation by yourself. You decide to go on a 10-day cruise. You forget to read the fine print and you discover shortly after leaving port that you are, in fact, on a gay cruise. Wonderful married gay couples, dating couples, and single gay people are everywhere and they’re having a great time.

Many of these people see that you’re by yourself and come and talk with you, and yes, most of the time they assume you’re gay. They ask you if you’re interested in finding a nice guy on the cruise. They ask you about “type”, they even make assumptions about how you live your life, your interests, goals, political views, and religious beliefs. The group will make jokes about shared experiences, “we’ve all been there” they’ll say laughing (even though you’ve definitely not been there).

Single gay men keep approaching you and striking up innocent flirtatious conversations, some of them even ask you on dates. The married gay couples around you encourage you to go on these dates because they want you to be as happy as they are. You try to decline without hurting anyone’s feelings, or “outing yourself.” You join these wonderful people in all their activities and have a lot of fun with them, but in the back of your mind is the question, "Would my new friends still like me if 'they knew'" How would that fact change the relationships?

You realize how stressful it is when everyone’s assumptions about you, your life, your goals, and your perspective don’t match your actual experience. It would be so nice if they just actually had a full picture of your experience and who you are. You don’t define your whole life by your sexuality, but you begin to realize that it actually informs more of your choices and conversations than you previously thought. All the people around you talk about sexuality more than they probably realize, but being in the majority, they probably don't realize it.

What do you do?

Perhaps you could say you’re simply not interested in dating right now, but that doesn’t really address all the other assumptions made about your lifestyle, goals, perspective, religious views etc. Then you realize that the simplest thing to do would probably be to tell them you’re straight (you worry about which label to use).

"Wo, wo, wo… don’t throw your sexuality in our face!” they’ll say. “What you do in your bedroom is your business, the world doesn’t need to know your personal stuff.” You’re a little surprised and even offended when they assume you talking about your sexuality, goals, and experience is automatically connected to an agenda. "You're just wanting attention." What if the married gay couples even assumed that you being “out” as a straight man will actually lead their children to being straight (which would be THE WORST)? They say that they don’t go broadcasting their sexuality all the time and you think “well, yah… you don’t have to, everyone assumes you are gay, this whole cruise is designed with the assumption that you’re gay.” Some will even say, "You only THINK you're straight, you haven't event REALLY tried being gay... you'll see."

Some of the gay people would say, “Oh, we ‘still’ love you, this doesn’t change anything.” and then they proceed to talk about gay things, rarely taking time to ask you about your experience. The lesbians on board find out you’re a straight man, and they assume you’re attracted to ALL of them, you know, because they’re women.

And, of course, there would be many of the gay people who would be great about you coming out as straight (or opposite-sex attracted... your choice), they’d apologize about some of the assumptions they made, and they would be excited to learn more about your life, your perspective, and your goals. They would see if there is anything they could do to make your cruise more comfortable. You don’t talk exclusively about sexuality with them, but when it seems pertinent, you feel comfortable talking about it. Awesome.

Once and a while you get a little tired of navigating false assumptions or explaining your sexuality to people, so you think it could be nice to find some other straight people on the cruise to connect with. The “wo, wo, wo-ers” are pretty critical of this decision. They assume you are just looking for other straight people so that you can have sex and showcase your relationship. When you’re with your straight friends, the gay majority on the boat can’t help but notice, observe, and even comment. Part of you wonders if there are other straight people around you who are keeping quiet, feeling a little lonely. You talk about your sexuality a little more, just in case it could help a “closeted” straight person feel less alone and know where they could find some empathy.

You wonder if it would have been easier just to continue to pretend you’re gay. BUT you remember how frustrating it was to have so many false assumptions made about you, to be set up on dates, to be hit on, and to feel like the people around you didn’t see the whole picture of your life (including sexuality)… it can be really lonely. Thank heaven for the cool gay people on the cruise who are okay with you being straight (and talking about it).”

The End.

So why do LGBTQ+ and SSA individuals feel like they want to talk about their experience or “come out”?

There are MANY reasons (many not addressed in my analogy), but sometimes straight people can understand a little better when they try to imagine if everything was switched (and it could be argued that straight person on a gay cruise would still experience more advantages… and dare I say… privileges, than a gay person in a straight majority culture – a conversation for another time).

There are also many reasons someone may choose NOT to talk about their sexuality… and that’s fine too. I have generally noticed that people become a lot healthier when they can talk to people about their complete experience.

Being at BYU feels like being on a straight cruise all the time. Being in a singles ward feels like being on a straight cruise. Being a member of the Church… being in Utah… and honestly being an LGBTQ or SSA person in this world can feel like being on a straight cruise… all the time. (Do you feel yourself reacting with, “well only if you made it a big deal”?... just curious?) Is feeling like you’re always on a straight cruise a bad thing? Not necessarily, but it has its complications... and some empathy makes all the difference.

Anyway… this metaphor is clearly imperfect and has a lot of holes, but hopefully it was a little thought provoking… and maybe it gives a little insight about why some people “come out”. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
​
Warning: the next part of this post mentions sex a few times. Leave now if that will upset you. Ben's part of the post that I plagiarized is far more important anyway, and from here on I'm just going to talk about my own similar but less significant experience.

Another reason I would add for LGBT people taking pride in their labels is as a backlash against thousands of years of abuse from straight people. LGBT people have a right to feel loved, worthwhile, and good enough the way they are. Being open about one's sexuality is a way of telling society As a young idiot, I didn't understand gay people and shared in the prejudice against them - ironically, I suppose, since I was also on the receiving end of said prejudice. I was called "faggot" four or five times a day throughout elementary school. I had to ask my parents what that word meant. They said, "A boy who has a boyfriend." Even at that young age, it occurred to me to wonder why a boy would choose to have a boyfriend when I personally never felt the slightest inclination to do so, but I suppressed that thought. My ignorance didn't really start to unravel until a close friend privately said that he was bisexual - and later on I guess he realized he was just gay, but even at that time the issue was that he liked boys and didn't want to. As he cried, I felt awkward. I thought, but fortunately didn't say, If it bothers you that much, why don't you just... not be gay?

I make no claim to know what it's like for gay men, let alone lesbians, but since realizing that I'm not heterosexual either I do feel a kinship and some similarity of experience. I can say without hesitation that in ways large and small like those mentioned in Ben's post, heterosexuality has been shoved in my face and down my throat 99.9% more than homosexuality. I try not to take offense from well-meaning people but I do roll my eyes sometimes. Like one time I invited this friend to watch Star Wars with some other friends because she likes Star Wars, and one of these other friends who was also female kept asking me questions about how well I knew her and what she was like or whatever, and she announced that "Christopher brought a girl" and it was obvious that she thought there was or should be something between us, because she wouldn't have said "Christopher brought a boy" if I had brought a boy. I just feel like there's this implicit assumption that I must be in desperate search for a girlfriend, and also that I must really want to have sex and think about it constantly because male.

Of course I realize there's nothing malicious here. Most people are heterosexual and that's why our species still exists and "heteronormativity" is just the natural default view, not a conscious choice to exclude people. And I don't want to overstate how pervasive the straight cruise stuff in Ben's post is for me personally. Because I'm not at BYU, almost nobody cares about my nonexistent love life, which is fine with me. Because women in our culture are taught to let men do all the work in dating instead of taking initiative to get what they want, any woman who for some unfathomable reason may be interested in me is not asking me out. Don't get me wrong, if she did I would totally say yes and give her a chance. I have been asked to two "ladies' choice" dances in my life, and each of those instances was

And it wasn't my fault neither of them went anywhere. I'd bet my life that I don't get flirted with very often, but it could be happening every day and I wouldn't notice. I only realized in hindsight that the one girl in the campus library in 2013 was either flirting with me or being an idiot because she started a conversation by asking me something she could have just looked up on the computer she was using. She was nice. I would have gone out with her if she had asked me out.

Like Ben, who also recently posted about his experience with relatively benign but nonetheless disturbing conversion therapy, I've had the very uncomfortable experience of people trying to explain that sex is beautiful or sacred or something. Only one tried to convince me personally that it isn't actually weird and gross, using logic, perhaps unaware that interest in sex is the literal opposite of logic. It literally comes from hormones that literally override the logical part of one's brain to convince one that sex isn't weird and gross even though it is. Years ago in my poetry class I had a classmate, now a good friend, who wrote a poem describing sex in explicit, thorough detail with the purpose of making normal people realize for the first time that it's weird and gross. But I was just like, "Yeah, I didn't know all these details, nor did I want to, but this is how I've always thought about sex because this is literally what sex is, so thanks for making me not feel like the only person on the planet who isn't blind." This clued me in to the possibility that others like me existed. Soon I discovered their community and felt understood and supported for a change and it was nice.

It turns out these people also used the label "asexual". I had picked that label for myself just because the prefix a- means "not", so it seemed straightforward. "Hetero"sexual people want to have sex with the opposite sex, "homo"sexual people want to have sex with the same sex, so an "a"sexual person would want to have sex with nobody. The only time I heard the word used in this context growing up was at Youth Conference when my friend Mike didn't dance with any girls and he said "I'll probably hate myself tomorrow, but I'm just feeling pretty asexual tonight." And I don't remember if I remembered that when I chose the label but thanks either way, Mike. This orientation was of course no more a choice than being straight or gay, and would persist whether I chose to label it and make myself more comfortable or not. The simple fact of the matter is that I never once at any point in my development from birth to this moment have felt the slightest hint of an inclination toward thinking that sex could be something I might possibly consider ever wanting to try. And I'm very cognizant that this makes me highly abnormal.

​​I "came out" in a blog post on the previous incarnation of my blog, and I've come out more personally with various friends either because it was relevant to something or I was just feeling frustrated with the world, and I've mentioned it around Facebook whenever it was relevant to something or I was just feeling frustrated with the world. I've gotten a positive response from everyone except my parents that I've talked to about it. Even when they had never heard of asexuality, which was often, I just explained that I don't have raging hormones in my brain telling me to want to have sex with literally anybody, and they grasped and accepted that simple concept very quickly. So there isn't a lot of stigma against asexuals. Others have reported getting comments like "You just haven't found the right person yet" but those comments, while insensitive and usually wrong, are not born of prejudice. But a lot of people don't know that we even exist. For me that's the most frustrating thing. As the world around me flaunts its obsession with sex and assumes I'm a part of that, I kind of just want to flip it off with both hands.

I guess proclaiming my sexuality or lack thereof - I honestly don't know or care which way to classify it - is a way of doing that. It's like saying to the world, "Your assumptions about me are wrong. You don't get to tell me what I'm supposed to like. I don't appreciate you constantly shoving sex in my face. Bite me." Of course I can't literally say "Bite me" to people because I want to be a good Christian. But freely acknowledging this one quirk as a significant part of my identity is very cathartic and I want to do it more often.

​Possibly necessary clarification to last week's post: I don't find Betty and Tamsen annoying. I think they're cute and funny. But I don't find Willie Scott, Navi, Jar Jar Binks, L3-37, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez annoying either, so take my opinion with a proverbial grain of salt.

Moving on, I got this piece of paper this week. To be precise, I walked into my previous apartment and it was sitting on the counter so I stole it.

Finally I have confirmation that I didn't flunk anything last semester. I wasn't man enough to check, but I had my concerns about Magical Realism and Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing. I just wasn't smart enough for Magical Realism, and also I stopped participating after the first day when half my classmates laughed at my awkward phrasing of a comment. Of course the professor did nothing about it and instead penalized me for not wanting to talk anymore, because that's how life works. But Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing was another kind of hell altogether. I didn't think it would be. I did pretty well in normal Creative Nonfiction Writing. Russ told me that my voice was unique enough to make him willing to read just about anything I write, that my essay "Ass Burgers" was one of his favorites of the term, and that I should strongly consider expanding it into a full-length memoir. Of course I also got plenty of constructive criticism because that was the point of the class, and I took it gracefully. I'm not afraid of criticism. I want to improve the shortcomings that I know exist in my writing, so I like it when people point them out.

The Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing class was a different beast altogether. Jennifer decided we were all going to write "flash nonfiction", which is two or three page essays where every word counts and there's a second, deeper meaning behind the story. Frankly, I think that sort of thing is pretentious more often than not. I put "deeper meanings" in my novel to make it more interesting, but they're subtle and nothing is really lost if somebody misses them. My novel's purpose first and foremost is to be an exciting adventure in space, period. And in nonfiction, I don't even have the freedom to make up events that serve a certain narrative. More to the point, this metaphorical stuff is not my native language. I don't even like metaphors. Similes are all right, but this concept of saying that one thing is another thing when it's not has always rubbed me the wrong way. I only get used to it with cliches that are so overused that nobody ever thinks about what the actual words of the metaphor literally mean (e.g. rubbing me the wrong way). Even those pissed me off when I was little. Why do you ask "Can I see that?" when you're already looking right at it, jerk?

The possibility of talking to the university's Disability Resource Center about my autism had been presented to me, but I didn't go through with it because I didn't think of it as a disability in the context of academic stuff. It's mostly just a disability in making friends, being attractive, and getting an adequate amount of sleep at any point in my life. If I had thought about all the class participation I would be expected to do, I probably would have talked to the people. But I'm smart, and I'm usually a great writer in large part because of my autism, and I didn't see myself as having a disability that the university needed to address. I'm not used to writing garbage. I'm used to writing really good stuff that I'm really proud of until the next day when I'm sick of it and think it's garbage. In my attempts to fit the mold set out by this class that was completely disloyal to the way my brain works and anything I would ever write voluntarily, I wrote garbage. It wasn't great for my delicate millennial self-esteem.

Like Indiana Jones in "The Last Crusade", I faced three devices of lethal cunning. The first challenge was finding anecdotes from my life that could be condensed so briefly. Technically our essays didn't have to be about bad things, but that's what makes for compelling literature. ​I wrote about stuff like the time my parents' friends' daughter convinced me to help her pull all the limbs off a daddy-long-legs, the time I was alone with an older male relative and he whipped out his disco stick and exhorted me several times to suck it, and the time a girl I met online pretended to be in love with me because she thought we were both joking. The second challenge was thinking of deeper meanings that could be applied, and Jennifer assured us that an overarching theme would evolve for our chapbooks at the end. My overarching theme was that I'm insecure. The third challenge was deftly weaving these meanings in such a way as to enrich the essays without either being too subtle or insulting the reader's intelligence. I failed miserably at that. Nobody understood what I was going for in any of them.

My first workshopped essay was about the incident already related here. In addition to it being garbage, I made several stylistic choices that people didn't understand. I put in quirky details that I just thought were interesting, like the bridge over the St. Lawrence River that wobbled when we jumped on it, but people expected them to have relevance to the story and then they didn't. Okay, fine. I mentioned that my friend's house "once served as a bed and breakfast but now serves as a far more modern and permanent business: a video rental store." While this may not be a great joke even by my standards, I would certainly hope it's recognizeable as one, but a classmate felt the need to say that she didn't think a video rental store was a modern or permanent business. So there's an unwritten rule not to attempt humor in these serious artistic ventures. I put the whole work in present tense because that seemed to fit, because I wanted to write it from the perspective of idiot teenager me while only hinting that the increased wisdom and regret of adult me, and this led Jennifer to speculate out loud (in gentler terms, of course) that maybe I'm still a homophobe. 

Going into detail about one of the friends who happened to be the weirdest friend I've ever had, without focusing the essay on him, was admittedly a huge mistake. Again, I thought his weirdness was just interesting, but it confused the crap out of people. Granted, this guy in person also confused the crap out of people. So I scrapped the original essay completely and wrote one about him instead, about how I hated him at first but then I realized he was a person with feelings too and it was really sweet. You can imagine, anyway, that in this workshop I felt eaten alive like in no workshop before and didn't feel like coming back to class ever. But I did because I didn't want to flunk, and eventually I noticed that the one person who knew me from a previous class, one where I was actually good, had messaged me afterward to say she didn't agree with all of the others' assessment and felt they had treated me unfairly, so that was nice of her. I'd screenshot the message if I could get back into Canvas, but I can't so you'll just have to decide whether I'm a trustworthy source.

I did write one essay, the night before the chapbook was due, that I don't think is garbage. Mind you, I'm not saying it's great, but I can read it without throwing up and I think it's the closest I ever came to the objective of the course. I may have slightly improved on this skill that I have little or no intention of ever consciously using again. At least enough to not flunk the class and be prevented from graduating, which is good enough for me.

​My parents never let me have a Nintendo or a Playstation. It shouldn't have been a big deal, but I had enough trouble making friends already without being unable to participate in my church and school peers' conversations about the video games they played on the Nintendos and/or Playstations they all had. So it wasn't a small matter when we visited my grandparents one year and Aunt Laurel or Aunt Michelle – they're twins, so I don't remember which – asked if I wanted to use their Nintendo. I asked if they had any Legend of Zelda games. They said they did have one, and they put it in and the rest was history.

I'd only seen one Legend of Zelda game, “Majora's Mask”. The kid who owned it never offered to let me play, but I had so much fun just watching him that I fell in love with the series. Laurel's and Michelle's game was the prequel to it, “Ocarina of Time” – which, unknown to me then, is widely regarded as not only the best Zelda game, but one of the greatest video games of all time. Understandably so. It sucked me in just as much as the first. I played it every chance I got, trying to compensate for years' worth of missed opportunities in two weeks. Laurel and Michelle had to play for me half the time since I didn't know where to go and didn't dare take on the Bosses myself, but that was all right.

Link was the default name for the protagonist, but I named him Christor. I don't remember if there wasn't room for Christopher or if I just assumed there wasn't because there seldom was. Anyway, Christor started the game as a small, unassuming boy from the middle of nowhere. A silent protagonist, in fact, with no dialogue beyond grunts and shouts.

At one point in the game, Christor drew the Master Sword and opened up the doorway to the Sacred Realm where the sacred artifact, the Triforce, lay hidden. And suddenly he wasn't a kid anymore. He was too small to wield the Master Sword, so it put him to sleep for seven years. When he awoke, he was a ten-year-old in a seventeen-year-old body, forced to grow up too fast and emerge into a darkened world full of evil. Because it also turned out that his quest to stop Ganondorf from stealing the Triforce had enabled Ganondorf to steal the Triforce. Christor, the alleged hero, had royally screwed everything up. But it wasn't his fault. If only he hadn't listened to Zelda, Hyrule would have been in that mess.

Then there was a whole new quest, a much longer and more difficult one. The rules were the same, building off what he had learned in his trials as a child, but the puzzles got harder and the enemies got stronger. At least he'd had a chance to learn, to prepare before growing up. But could anything really prepare him for what he had to do? In any case, he must have been terrified. He must have lain awake at night sometimes, sweating and palpitating over the things he'd seen and experienced.

When all was said and done, though, Christor was significant. Christor made a difference. Christor saved Hyrule. And then Zelda, realizing that everything was her fault, sent him back in time to before he fell asleep, so he could live through the years that he'd missed. Since he never said anything, I never knew his thoughts on the matter. I wonder if he considered it a blessing to live time over, or if he worried about all the mistakes he would now have a chance to make. After his one big mistake that wasn't really his fault, he'd been safely out of harm's way for seven years. Now that would be undone.

Another side effect of this was that Ganondorf's reign was prevented (why didn't they just do that in the first place?) and people no longer remembered what Link had done for them. After all the countless hours he spent serving people and being a hero, he didn't even get to attend the victory celebration, and then nobody cared at all. As far as they were concerned, he was insignificant, even nonexistent.

I didn't think about all these implications while I was playing “Ocarina of Time” as a child, but I think about them now.

Ta-da! Notice how I tried to subtly manipulate you into  feeling sorry for poor little me? Did it work?

So was this piece of paper "worth it"? Was it worth the seven and a half year wait, the change of majors, the leave of absence, the mornings I walked to campus at quarter to seven with ice in my hair, the mornings I got up even though I didn't want to be alive anymore, the loss of my scholarship after I spiraled into depression and stopped giving a ----about school, the suicide attempts, the tens of thousands of dollars of debt that I'll be stuck with for God knows how long, the research papers I wrote when I could have been doing literally anything else, the countless rejections large and small when I tried to build a social circle or get a date? Not really, no. Not when it turned out to be virtually useless because in today's economy I need a Masters' degree to be worth anything. But it's what I came for and now, after a ridiculously convoluted and circuitous journey, I have it. I guess it was worth the handful of really good enduring friendships I did get, and, oh yeah, I actually learned a few things. From my current major I learned how to be a better writer and from my previous major I learned how to explain to creationists that they're wrong.

Even though, given the state of my health, I don't anticipate living past my early forties, I don't mind having my own pace of adulting that's slower than almost everyone else's. It's not the absolute slowest. There were three people in Advanced Nonfiction Writing in their early thirties. And as far as I know they're still in school this semester while I'm not. But it's not a contest because individuality and stuff. And I don't even hate the prospect of graduate school anymore. I hope I can do it here, because nowhere else will do. After all these years I find myself truly, madly, deeply, hopelessly, consummately in love with the Ray B. West Building, Utah State University, and Logan Utah. I'm not cheating on any of them. They're like a Siamese triplet kind of deal. I wonder if graduate school will take another seven years? I was just thinking in terms of that one biblical story today, that if I had started working for a wife when I came to Utah, by this time I would have one and I would only need to work seven more years for the one I actually wanted. That's kind of a messed-up story when you think about it.

This past week I celebrated Darwin Day by going to a JTM (the artist formerly known as James the Mormon) and Jay Warren concert at the Cache Venue. I'm sure JTM is working on changing his name once more to JTMOTCOJCOLDS, but these things take time when you've got a following on several social media and music streaming platforms. Yeah, so I'm not sure if this post will be of much interest or make much sense to anyone not familiar with the religion that they and I share, and I'm sorry about that but I have to write about these things sometimes. You can skim up to the paragraph beinging with "So, the concert" in bold letters if you think that will help. I wouldn't want you to miss out on my exciting experience.

I'm not the biggest rap/hip-hop person, but it's a music genre and I like every music genre. I barely ever go to concerts, but the tickets were on sale when I saw them and I think very highly of JTM as a person and am happy to support his endeavors. His role in the music world performs two important functions. First, it makes rap and hip-hop music accessible to people who are turned off by excessive swearing, drugs, and misogyny. There's nothing inherently wrong or tasteless about rap and hip-hop as a genre, but for some reason its lyrics struggle to rise above the level of high school boys desperately trying to act cool. I die a little inside every time I have to exclude or remove a really catchy specimen from my playlist because of its content. Second, it helps to legitimize The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a serious world religion. But what is this blasphemy? Hear me out on it.

A lot of LDS entertainment has traditionally centered around mocking the idiosyncracies of Utah (and especially Wasatch Front) culture. And that's fine, because those things deserve to be mocked. But it can get out of hand. It makes them quirky cultural artifacts with very limited appeal. Take, for example, the mediocre LDS comedy film "The Singles' Ward", which is not as good as "The Home Teachers" but light-years better than "Church Ball". Any movie with more than one funny line is better than "Church Ball". Same with "Suits on the Loose". The concept of escaped convicts impersonating missionaries is comic gold, yet the funniest part of that movie was that a friend saw the DVD in my dorm room and he thought it said "Sluts on the Loose" and that became an inside joke. And what is "Napoleon Dynamite"? Does it even count as LDS or comedy or a movie? After a lifetime of hearing it quoted out of context and being led to believe that it was some kind of masterpiece, I finally watched it a couple years ago at a friend's house, and afterward she was like "Now you understand our culture" and I thought to myself, Your culture is stupid.

Anyway, at the time I watched "The Singles' Ward", I myself had been in a singles' ward in Utah for four years. But instead of thinking "Wow, this is so relatable!" I mostly found myself thinking "Wow, Provo Mormons are freaks." No offense to any who are reading this. I'm just being honest about what the movie made me think at that time. Imagine, my dear Utah peeps, how much less relatable this film is to an LDS viewer who's never left Wisconsin, or Paraguay, or Zimbabwe. Now imagine how incomprehensible this film is to literally anyone else on the planet. And now, if you didn't already, you can probably grasp why the rash of like-minded films in the early 2000s will soon be even more lost to time than they already are. I should say that I do think "Mobsters and Mormons" is still really good. Because it's specifically about a mobster being relocated to Utah, the jokes about Utah's idiosyncracies are justified, and because it follows the perspective of a confused outsider family whom we're supposed to sympathize with, the potential confusion to viewers is also justified. And the mobster has no filter and no tact and he's hilarious. I wish I was him.

But there are what I regard as high-quality LDS films available - not without flaw by any means, but far more accessible and far less dated than the ill-advised comedies, such as "God's Army", "God's Army 2: States of Grace", "The Saratov Approach", "Ephraim's Rescue", "Freetown", "The Cokeville Miracle", "Jane and Emma". One time I said I liked "God's Army" and my dad said he didn't really like it and I said at least it's a lot better than "The Singles' Ward" and my mom said she doesn't think "The Singles' Ward" was actually intended to be a good movie. Instead of making jokes that implicitly equate an ostensibly global religion with Provo, these ones aren't shy to explore universal themes that anybody can take something away from. That doesn't mean they have to be "serious" all the time. Most of them have some lighthearted moments. "God's Army" even has some rather juvenile humor derived from immature missionaries that doesn't detract from its overall thoughtfulness. I don't even object to the concept of LDS comedies, but I think they could be done better and have broader appeal to justify their existence and stand the test of time. 

So what does any of this have to do with JTM? This is what any of this has to do with JTM:

In case you can't be bothered to indulge in this cultural experience, the song drops as many LDS buzzwords as possible, separated by the occasional "Morrrmon! Mormon rap! Do the Muh-Muh-Mormon rap!" Okay, so it's a bit of cute, harmless fun. But if this is all we have to offer, it sends a message that these often localized stereotypes are what it means to be a Latter-day Saint. It precludes the possibility that some Saint in India who's never eaten green Jell-O or attended BYU is every bit as "Mormon" as the protagonist of the song. It certainly makes it more difficult for an ignorant outsider hearing the song to consider that possibility on their own. Perhaps even more concerningly, if this is all we have to offer, it tells the world that all the Restoration has to offer in terms of culture is parodies and jokes. And look, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with parodies and jokes. (I love the work of Cal Grondahl, Pat Bagley and Robert Kirby, for example.) I'm not saying this is a terrible song. But I'm saying this is where JTM comes in. And boy, did he come in. This was my first exposure to him, way back in '15:

We gon bring it back for ya baby more dreams
And if you got questions then you know you gonna see
So imma bring it back for ya
Know I'd go to bat for ya
I know where you at when you go to your knees

Hmmm. I sense a shift. In this one, JTM and Jay Warren unironically yet uniquely relate the story of Joseph Smith's First Vision. So what does this one tell the world, besides the story's own obvious message of heartfelt questioning and prayer? It tells the world that the story of Joseph Smith is incredible enough to inspire legitimate works of art, including rap and hip-hop. It tells the world that the restored gospel - not just the unfortunate culture that's grown up around it, but the restored gospel itself - is fertile ground for multiple genres of creativity. "We are proud of the artistic heritage that the Church has brought to us from its earliest beginnings, but the full story of Mormonism has never yet been written nor painted nor sculpted nor spoken. It remains for inspired hearts and talented fingers yet to reveal themselves." If we don't strive to reach that point, if we're content to just laugh at a stereotypical subset of ourselves for generations to come, then how can we expect anyone else to take our religion seriously when we don't? JTM and Jay Warren gave us what is, as far as I know, an unprecedented leap forward in this area of that regard.

So, the concert. It said it started at 7, but what it actually meant was that the doors opened at 7 and it started twenty minutes later. Whatever. ​There were three, count 'em, three opening acts before the guys that people actually came to see. They were all right, but I just couldn't get into them. I wandered around aimlessly for a bit, texted a close friend to rant about the unfairness of life and my anger toward God, and gazed longingly at the Cache Venue's overpriced menu items that were out of my league. Then Jay Warren came on, and I started to pay more attention. Then JTM came on with Jay Warren backing him up, and I was riveted by his infectious energy and enthusiasm. The crowd ate it up. I'm not sure which demographic was funnier to watch dancing and singing along - under twelve, or over forty. This despite the fact that he acknowledged his fame recently causing him the worst depression of his life, and disclosed a childhood filled with abuse. His main message, though, was that God loves each and every one of us no matter who we are. And coming from a rap/hip-hop star, it rang with its own special sincerity that drove the crowd wild.

After the concert, I lined up for the Meet & Greet. I was at the back of the line but that was fine because I was in a patient mood. Then some girls who didn't have Meet & Greet tickets lined up behind me. One of them had gotten to dance on stage. Two of them were the ones that I had looked at because I thought I recognized one of them from church but I didn't and then they saw me looking at them and I tried to avoid them for the rest of the night. And two of them were these goofballs that I met at a party in October and have seen a couple times since then. Let's call them Betty and Tamsen, because those are their names. So Betty and Tamsen were absorbed in their own little conversation and I just patiently waited for them to notice me. When Tamsen notice me, she squealed so loud and long that I started to get uncomfortable. How do you respond to that? The only other time I've gotten that kind of reaction from a woman was when I gave one something I wrote to read. I don't know the reason for it this time.

She was all like, "Where were you? You should have invited us!" etc. And maybe I should have, because then I wouldn't have felt awkward when my grandmother asked who I was going with and I had to say "Just me" because I wasn't quick-witted enough to say "The Holy Ghost, my constant companion." So then Betty and Tamsen did the thing they like to do where they both talk to me at once, from either side, not letting me get a word in edgewise, and then say stuff like "Are we bothering you? Are we peer pressuring you? Are we making you uncomfortable?" This time, it was because they tried to convince me to tell the guy in charge that they had to be in my picture. That was perfectly fine with me, and would have made for a better blog post, but they felt guilty and backtracked right away. They toyed with a few different ideas for getting in, and they toyed with the idea of giving up and going home. I said they could just bat their eyelashes at the guy and they said that was against their principles.

So they were still discussing that when I moved up to the front of the line, right by the mysterious curtain that divided us normal people from the celebrities, and I sat down on a conveniently situated stool and that tricked the guy next to me into thinking I worked there. Then the guy in charge was like "How many?" and before I could respond he ushered both of us in, and that's why a total stranger is in this picture with me.

It was a relief, actually, since I was starstruck and had no idea what to say and he did all the talking while I was awkwardly awkward. JTM didn't seem particularly thrilled to see us. I imagine he just wanted to go home, and I can't blame him and I'm going to be the same way when my adoring fans want me to autograph my books, but when you decide to become a celebrity you give up perks like that. It will be worth it for him, though, when my own fame has exploded and this picture is worth a thousand dollars. I think I'll Photoshop the shadows out from under my eyes as soon as I learn how. Also, please note the awesome shirt that my awesome sister gave me for Christmas.

So the random guy gave me his number and I sent him the pictures (this one and four even worse ones) and then I naturally assumed I would never see him again. I saw him again the following night. Inside my house. He came over with approximately two hundred other people to solicit a business that these other guys run from my new house on Wednesday evenings from 6 to 9 pm. They sell spaghetti toast and inside-out toasted cheese sandwhiches for five dollars each with optional chips and soda for an additional dollar. You can get it delivered somewhere in Logan or thereabouts for an additonal two dollars by texting 801-819-5517, but why not save money and get the full experience of music and loud camaraderie by picking up in person at 435 Boulevard, Logan, Utah? No joke, it's a party. Just please close the freaking door behind you like an adult and don't block the hallway to my bedroom. This advertisement has not been approved or paid for by anyone, but it should be.

Betty and Tamsen and their three compatriots got in behind me with no difficulty because it turns out the guy didn't actually even check anybody for Meet & Greet tickets. They spent considerably longer with JTM and Jay Warren than I did, even though I actually bought a Meet & Greet ticket. But that's okay. I'm happy for them. They owe me for convincing them not to give up and go home. Then Tamsen made me squeeze into the backseat of their car with three other people because she couldn't accept the fact that I like walking. But that's okay. I'm just grateful that because of her and Betty's endorsement, their friends were reassured that I wasn't a creep just because I looked at them. All things considered, I've had worse evenings.