​I realize it may sound like joking at best and complaining about first-world problems at worst when I express my disappointment at running up last night against Spotify's 10,000 song playlist limit that I wasn't aware of. You may consider it absurd that I would want to have more than 10,000 songs on a playlist. The reason I want to have more than 10,000 songs on a playlist is that I like shuffling every artist and every genre into an enormous game of chance. Heavy metal and polka and New Age and Dora the Explorer back-to-back is just fine with me. Many years ago when I got my first mp3 player, I had trouble even grasping the concept of a "playlist", because why would I want to choose just some of my music? My idea of a playlist was the entire Windows Media Player library. So here's my playlist, capped at 10,000 songs unless and until Spotify changes its mind. (There's a big discussion about it here, where Spotify went from "The 1% of our customers who want that many songs don't matter" to "It's not in our plans, but it's a good idea." So there's hope.)

I started group therapy again this week, seeing as this is my last chance before I'll graduate and not be able to afford it. There's not much to say about that because, you know, confidentiality, but I wanted to mention it because there are people who think I shouldn't be open about my mental illness and I want them to know exactly what I think of that attitude. There are a lot of people who should go to therapy but don't because our society has wrongly made them feel that it's something to be embarrassed about. As a child when I had to go to a building labeled "Massena Mental Health Clinic", I felt humiliated and dirty inside, and I shouldn't have, but that's the mindset I was fed from literally everywhere. There are also a lot of people who should go to therapy but don't because their insurance doesn't cover it because our society decided long ago that only physical problems matter. Anyway, I already love my fellow group members, just as I did the last two times. I hope they love me too. It's going to be awkward if they don't.

When I was meeting with someone on campus for unrelated reasons having to do with me not being able to buy groceries because someone took all my money, and she started asking about my personal life and recommended therapy, she asked (among other things) whether I ever feel like hurting people. And I said "Yes" while thinking Duh. I highly doubt there's one human on this planet above the age of five with at least a bare minimum of mental capacity who has never wanted to hurt someone. Even on a good day when I enjoy being alive, I would bet my life that everyone from Gandhi to Mother Theresa to Pope Francis has wanted to hurt someone before. But there's this notion in our society that mentally ill people are dangerous and scary, even though the only statistically significant difference between violence from mentally ill people and other people disappears when drugs and alcohol are factored in. Gee, I wonder why mentally ill people in our society would feel the need to use drugs and alcohol. What a mystery.

I'm wondering, not for the first time, why several nobodies on the internet suddenly think it's their place to deny the medical and scientific consensus that addiction is a disease. I mean, just because people already have that attitude toward evolution, climate change, vaccines, the shape of the Earth, and 9/11 doesn't mean we need more things on that list. And their argument makes me want to claw my eyeballs out. So you see, addicts are just like non-addicts, with the same brain chemistry and education and life circumstances and social support, and the only difference is that addicts decided to start doing drugs for literally no reason because they're stupid, and this means that addiction isn't a disease because the definition of a disease apparently mentions something about "choice" in the invisible fine print somewhere, but STDs still count as diseases because reasons. That's not even a straw man - have you seen that stupid meme with the guy on the bike falling over? I hate to think how my close friend who turned to heroin because both her parents were abusing her must feel when she sees this garbage.

The fraternities on campus tried to recruit people (specifically male people) this week and I participated in as many activities as I could for the food. Now I know how to play poker. They were all real friendly, almost cultishly so, and I would be seriously considering joining up with one of them if it didn't cost five hundred dollars. That would probably be a great bargain if this were my first semester rather than my last, but it's not and it's not and also I don't currently have anywhere near five hundred dollars. I enjoyed my brief time with them except for the moment when I was at a potluck and a bunch of fraternity guys were clustered around somebody's phone watching something and I came over to see what it was and it was porn. What the crap, guys?

Barbara Res, a former construction executive on Trump Tower, recently claimed:

On this particular day, the architect had come to Donald Trump’s office to show him what the interior of the residential elevator cabs would look like. Trump looked at the panels where the buttons you push to reach a floor were located. He noticed that next to each number were some little dots.

“What’s this?” Trump asked. “Braille,” the architect replied. Trump told the architect to take it off, get rid of it. “We can’t,” the architect said, “It’s the law.” “Get rid of the (expletive) Braille. No blind people are going to live in Trump Tower. Just do it,” Trump yelled back, calling him weak.

The more the architect protested, the angrier Trump got. Donald liked to pick on this guy. As a general rule, Trump thought architects and engineers were weak as compared to construction people. And he loved to torment weak people. But did he think the architect would remove the Braille from the panels? Never.

Naturally, many people have chosen not to believe her claim because it's entirely inconsistent with the respectful, tolerant way our president has always spoken about demographics that aren't him. (That was sarcasm.) But even if there was a video of him saying these words, it wouldn't matter to most of them. It's been pretty well-demonstrated at this point that he can say whatever he wants with no real consequences, in fact sometimes to his own benefit. Yay, democracy. On a slightly related note, I've seen Braille on signs and wondered how blind people are supposed to know to put their hands there in the first place. Are they just supposed to touch every inch of every wall? That's gross.

I have my doubts as to whether anybody actually listens to the songs that I share as a public service, so I haven't done it much this year. But here's one.

This week The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released the first volume of its four-volume history project, which can be bought as a nice paper book or read for free here. As I mentioned almost a year ago, I was invited with several others to give feedback on a sample chapter, so while school will prohibit me from reading the completed book for some time I feel good about it nonetheless. I feel these volumes will be worthwhile to believers and non-believers alike, whether as a promotion of faith or mere historical interest, because everything in them is documented with primary sources. They eschew the myths and misconceptions that Latter-day Saints have been repeating as gospel (no pun intended) for generations.

Elder Quentin L. Cook gave a devotional tonight with a couple of the Church's historians in honor of the book's release. Kate Holbrook hit the nail on the head with the first question about part of what these volumes are intended to accomplish in getting the "controversial" stuff more out there. She struck a reasonable balance that most people can't seem to be bothered with: no, the Church didn't try to hide its history, but no, it isn't helpful at all for believers to condemn you for being shocked to learn something that was mentioned in a church magazine decades ago. Also, it's President Russell M. Nelson's birthday. He's 94. My last surviving great-grandparent died a couple years ago at age 94. That makes me wary, but President Nelson seems to be in much better health. Then again, so did Elder Perry... anyway, happy birthday to our beloved prophet.

I'm twenty-five. Not particularly old, I know, but more than old enough, I thought, to be familiar with every ugly, broken, defective, and/or unholy thing about myself. But recently, in the continuing process of trying to explain why everything I say or do is wrong and nothing is ever his fault, my father gave me the unwelcome revelation that I was diagnosed well over a decade ago with something I'd never heard of called "oppositional defiant disorder". I mean "unwelcome" in the sense that the revelation that your house has burned down is unwelcome, even though you'd probably like to be aware of it. Needless to say this is an unpleasant surprise, but I believe it's almost always best to know the truth even when the truth sucks, as it frequently does. An institute teacher of mine once succinctly defined life as, "You have problems and then you die."

Of course, this may not be the truth, because the diagnosis may have been wrong. This whole time, I thought the reason I was oppositional and defiant toward my parents was because they hit me, yelled at me, and pulled my hair when I violated arbitrary social norms they hadn't taught me. (There's actually a lot I could complain about regarding my parents, but I've tried to keep it out of this space and save it for my memoir instead.) And maybe that's actually still true and the therapists pretended I was the one with a problem because they subscribed to the philosophy of, quote, "Rule one: The parent is always right. Rule two: if the parent is wrong, see rule one," close quote. And I'm not entirely convinced of the quality of the very limited options (for therapy in this case, but also literally anything else besides trees, deer, mosquitoes, and drugs) in St. Lawrence County, New York. But if the diagnosis is correct, it probably goes a long way toward explaining why I'm so critical of everyone in the world. And that's another thing that I just assumed was shaped both by my parents and the bullies I dealt with throughout my formative years.

Look, if this is actually a thing, I would never presume that it absolves me of responsibility for my actions. But contrary to what some Neanderthals continue to believe well into the twenty-first century, brain chemistry doesn't exist just to take up space. Without having a ton of expertise on the subject, the mere fact that identical twins frequently choose to wear the same colored outfits on the same day without consulting each other strongly implies that the extent to which our brain chemistry dominates each one of us is freaking scary. This is why only God can issue final judgment on people. This is why it isn't our place to say that even Adolf Hitler might not someday go to heaven. Not that I think he will, but it isn't my place to say. I'd love to see Brock Turner hanged from a lamppost, but if God decided to forgive him afterward, good for him. Judging two brains that are wired differently by the same standard and condemning one for failing to measure up to the other is incredibly asinine and harmful, and it's exactly how I was raised. But never mind that. I said I was going to save that stuff.

If all my criticism of other people has made it seem like I blame them for everything and consider myself perfect and guiltless, I'm sorry, and you should know that nothing could be further from the truth. Nobody is less forgiving of me than I am. I still hate myself for losing my sister's camera in 2009. I still hate myself for pulling all of a daddy-long-legs' limbs off longer ago than I can remember, though in my defense that idea came from the girl I was hanging out with. I still hate myself for asking my grandmother how much my Christmas present cost. I still hate myself even just for saying stupid things that had no actual consequences for myself or anybody. But I've never signed an executive order based on fearmongering lies to block terrified, impoverished, homeless refugees from finding safety in the so-called greatest country in the world, so I don't think criticizing Trump more than myself makes me that much of a hypocrite. What else am I supposed to write about? The weather? I have occasionally felt like I should apologize for being so abrasive, but I would just keep being abrasive afterward, so what's the point?

As far as me not knowing about my alleged "oppositional defiant disorder" I get that labels can be limiting and detrimental. But they're also crucial for any human to understand the world. Refusing to label an issue doesn't make it cease to exist. I don't know that it would have caused me any harm to know about this label a long time ago. It's not like I didn't already know as a child that things were wrong with me. I knew it wasn't normal to have to go to psychologists I knew it wasn't normal to have to go to a mental health clinic. I knew it wasn't normal to have to cycle through five kinds of antidepressants. When I learned about the label "Asperger's" - well, first of all, when I heard it of course I thought it was "ass burgers" and I wasn't crazy about that at all, but when I learned what it actually was and what it entailed, all I felt was relief and comfort that I wasn't the only person on the planet whose brain was wired this way. You would have thought I was, from the way other kids at school treated my existence like a crime against humanity. That's going into the memoir too.

Every human's brain, even the healthiest one, is specially evolved to prevent him or her from thinking rationally. When one is aware of this, one can try to overcome one's biases. So for example, I used to be very conservative and proactively seek out evidence for conservatism and downplay any evidence for liberalism, and this is a pretty common thing for conservatives to do and liberals to do in reverse. Conservatives/liberals seek out conservative/liberal books, websites, etc. to convince themselves of what they already believe, not to learn. I now try to recognize my confirmation bias and ignore it, and consequently I now choose my views on political issues on a case-by-case basis instead of preconceived loyalty to a certain worldview. I believe what I feel compelled by the evidence to believe, and that's why, for example, I cannot in good conscience go around saying "gun control doesn't work" while the United States is having a gun violence problem entirely unique among first-world countries. I recognize that I'm undoubtedly still wrong about many things and lack the answers for many things, but unwillingness to think about them is not the reason why.

As arrogant as I may sound, it is nonetheless a fact that if more people were this honest with themselves we wouldn't have thousands of fools bending over backwards to defend the most repugnant and indefensible things their chosen politicians say and do. We wouldn't have idiots who claim to follow Christ trying to explain that it's okay for the president of the United States to refer to African nations as "shithole countries" (pardon his French) because, come on, they actually are. Trump could literally eat a baby on live national television and he would still have supporters complaining about how the media try to make him look bad. Don't even try to pretend he wouldn't. I feel like I should apologize for making this more political than I intended, but then it's not about politics so much as basic decency, and I wouldn't be letting him off the hook if he had a D next to his name. It's funny how people call me a liberal nowadays after the countless hours I spent trashing Obama, who, for all his faults and scandals and poor decisions, had more class in his pinky finger than Trump has in his everything.

Anyway, judging by the context, which also included yet again bringing up unremembered incidents from my childhood as if they happened yesterday and define my current personality, the only reason my father bothered to mention "oppositional defiant disorder" to me after all these years was as part of his mission to invalidate the way I see the world. If anyone had mentioned it to me a lot sooner with the object of actually being helpful, I could have potentially made far more progress in life than I have so far. I'm unclear on how exactly I can be expected to address problems that I don't know exist. If I had known that something outside of my control was making me oppositional and defiant (if it is, which I'm still a bit skeptical of) I could have made a conscious effort to resist it. I could have looked at situations where I was inclined to feel oppositional and defiant, recognized that my feelings were the irrational product of a mental defect, and reacted differently. I've done this with confirmation bias and I've done this with irrational negative emotions that I've poetically compared to screaming children who just need to be ignored until they shut up.

But I'm twenty-five, and I've been living on my own for seven years, and I don't really feel like starting now after all this lost time. So we'll see.

Today was my last day at Jenson Online, for a while and possibly ever, so that I can focus on school and fulfill my potential on assignments like I wasn't able to do last semester. Since I was such a good employee I'm welcome to return whenever I want, so that's a nice safety net to have, but whether I do or not depends on what progress I'm able to make on my actual career goals in the next few months. Like, it might help if I actually get something published. Just a thought. With any luck, I'll soon have a job in the USU English department, but that's contingent on whether I can out-compete people with equal or superior writing skills. My best chance is to focus on what makes me unique, which is that I'm almost the only person in any writing class I've ever had who tries to write funny things (and, if I may flatter myself, usually succeeds).

When I started at Jenson Online nearly two years ago, of course I had just escaped from the call center. After much prayer and debate I decided to quit that job so I would have time to go in for an interview for this one. Even though I had zero ten key experience. I practiced really hard to make sure I could pass the ten key test that accompanied the interview, and then I did so well that I knew I would get the job despite a couple faux pases like forgetting to stand up when the guy shook my hand. And then I realized that my hunt-and-peck method wouldn't work while I was reading the ISBNs out of the books, so I had to learn it the right way within the first few days. I was very blessed to get this job, is what I'm saying. At that time I thoroughly enjoyed it but knew the excitement would someday wear off. I compared it to a marriage, or at least how I imagine a marriage would be, where you start off crazy in love and then slowly the banalities of real life take over and the magic is lost, and you have to remind yourself how blessed you are to be with this person. So I guess this is a divorce over someone younger and more beautiful.

And I learned today that a former coworker I barely knew somehow discovered my blog and told another coworker about it who told another coworker about it, and they like it. I know I'm a great writer, but I feel like my posts all summer have been hastily and poorly written, so that was a nice confidence booster. I was actually just thinking about giving up on it. Since 2018 started my previously satisfactory pageviews have gone through the floor despite doing everything I can think of to search engine optimize the site. I don't know if it's people turning off their cookies or what. As I write this my stats tell me that today I've had 64 visitors and 424 page views, meaning that each visitor viewed an average of 6.625 pages, which is somewhat typical and makes little or no sense to me. If my site is really so compelling that people keep looking at additional pages after they first stumble on it, then it should be rising organically through the search results and getting more and more visitors. It was getting more and more visitors until 2018 started. Now it won't no matter what I do. Any time the stats start going up and I think this stupid slump is over, they plummet again.

One thing I had hoped to do was have a substantial following on my blog so that when I published a book, I could advertise it here and already have loyal fans eager to read it. I don't think that's going to happen now. I've been at this for well over three years and the lack of discernible progress has been quite discouraging. But I feel encouraged now. Even if only a small cluster of local people get enjoyment out of it, that's something and I hope I can continue to please them. Happy thoughts, happy thoughts.

As most people reading this are already aware, Russell M. Nelson, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has started an initiative to stop calling The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints "the LDS Church" or "the Mormon Church" or "Mormonism" and to stop calling Latter-day Saints "Mormons". So I'm going through my website and change most instances of "Mormon" to "Latter-day Saint" even though it will do my search ranking no favors. I'm not going through all my old blog posts because that would take far too long. These new guidelines are, of course, less than convenient, and almost certainly will be very detrimental to the Church's visibility online and in the public consciousness, but I choose to trust that President Nelson knows what he's doing. Who said religion was supposed to be convenient? A prophet who always just reaffirmed one's pre-existing opinions would be useless. President Nelson says this can't be done, but the Lord wants it done so it will be.

I feel sorrier for people in some other languages, though. In Spanish, "Mormon" is "Mormón". "Latter-day Saint" is "Santo de los Últimos Días". Spanish speakers are now expected to say nine syllables instead of two. The full name of the Church, "La Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Últimos Días", is twenty syllables, while "Iglesia SUD" is seven (because the letter S is pronounced "essay"). And they're probably no longer allowed to jokingly call it "La Iglesia de José Smith y Un Dios" (The Church of Joseph Smith and One God - get it, because the words use the same first letters as the actual name. Spanish humor is weird.) And the loss of recognition overseas will be even worse than in the US. Even people I met from India had some idea of what "Mormons" were from watching "South Park", even though "Mormons" in India are literally one in a million (literally), but of course they had never heard of "Latter-day Saints".

Tomorrow: Bear Lake. Monday: College. And that's as far in advance as I know anything. Fingers crossed that this semester will be less stressful than the last one.

Against all odds, while dredging the internet for Legend of Zelda stuff to sate my obsession, I discovered a snarky synopsis of the Lamp Chop Chanukah Special entitled "Lamb Chop's Special Chanukah". If I wasn't already feeling nostalgic enough from working on my memoir, this cranked it up to eleven because I watched "Lamb Chop's Special Chanukah" when it aired in December 1995. I was two and a half years old. I really want to be two and a half years old again. All I remember from it was that Charlie Horse opened his Chanukah present early, prompting Lamb Chop to taunt "You're gonna get in trouble!", and that his present did indeed cause trouble as troublemaking people kept magically coming out of it, the first being some kind of genie who kicked the furniture and made something fall off the wall by yelling at it. It was very weird. Even at that age I wondered why Shari Lewis was giving her kids/pets such dangerous presents. Learning the context almost twenty-three years later hasn't really made it less weird.

After reading the synopsis, I still don't remember anything else from it, but it fuels my nostalgia nonetheless. Since it's inexplicably not on YouTube I'm debating whether to spend twenty dollars on a VHS tape that I have no way of playing. And what are these other things?

​Lamb Chop's existence predates her early nineties show "Lamb Chops Play-Along" by over thirty years, though, and it turns out she's occasionally been a bit less than child-friendly, as in this couple of very old clips. I must admit Lamb Chop swearing was not something I expected to hear ever, albeit they're just a couple of minor swears that aren't even swears in the United Kingdom, Australia or New Zealand. These clips both end with the same weird song, and that's the part most worth watching, as Shari Lewis switches between herself and the puppet with inhuman speed and precision. She never seemed old to me despite being in her sixties, but holy crap, she looks so young here despite probably being in her forties.

It also turns out that Shari Lewis cheated by celebrating Chanukah and Christmas. What lucky kids/pets.