I, my roommate, and our landlord all spent Christmas at home alone, but at least I did fun things while my landlord decided it was a good day to paint the empty rooms and wash his car. I watched a 1933 short film called The Mascot, which is a live-action fever dream version of Toy Story. It follows a toy puppy on an adventure to get an orange for a little blind girl. It's not a cute children's film, though, because one of the toys gets his head run over by a car and the others spend an inordinate amount of time in hell with Satan and various monsters for no adequately explained reason. Artists, am I right? I loved it, though. The stop-motion effects look phenomenal, and in shots where the toys interact with the real world, they're integrated flawlessly. It's sure to become a Christmas classic in my household.

I'm thinking about this part of the Christmas story:

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.
Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily.
But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. (Matthew 1:18-20)

When I heard this part of the story at church as a kid, this is how I understood it: "Joseph didn't want to marry Mary, but an angel told him he had to."

I reminisce about this amusing anecdote because now my former church is teaching children, "Joseph [Smith] didn't want to marry thirty women and teenage girls, but an angel told him he had to." (paraphrased) That narrative sounds absolutely deranged to everyone else in the world, but it's what they're going with. Joseph, the new illustrated scripture story on the church's website would have us believe, was like, "Oh no, God, please don't make me cheat on my legal wife with all these other women and teenage girls. Anything but that, please. This is the hardest thing ever. It's so hard. It's really hard. I really, really, really don't want to do it, but I will be obedient because sometimes God tells us to do hard things. Did I mention that it's hard?" Yes, the captions use the word "hard" so many times that it seems intentional. And the images depict beds more often than necessary. What they don't depict is multiple wives. Somehow the images remain almost entirely focused on men and how hard they were finding polygamy.

You might think I'd be glad that the church is teaching children about Joseph's polygamy. It never taught me about Joseph's polygamy. I knew about Brigham Young's polygamy through cultural osmosis, but all I ever heard regarding Joseph was Emma this, Emma that. I learned the truth from a secular magazine article when I was seventeen. I thought it was a mistake, but my parents said it was true, so they'd also known about this and never told me, which kind of pissed me off. (My mom hates polygamy so much that she's said she won't discuss or think about it at all, but why she doesn't see that discomfort as a colossal red flag about the religion she belongs to and the god she worships is beyond me.) The church is now being a little more honest because the internet has given it no alternative, but "a little" are the key words here. Its story for children leaves out literally all the actual details of how Joseph practiced polygamy because it's almost impossible to learn about those without recognizing him as a sexual predator. For example, it mentions that sometimes "Emma did not want Joseph to marry other women" and leaves it at that. It doesn't mention that he did it behind her back anyway and told her in a "revelation" that Jesus would destroy her if she didn't quit complaining. So no, I'm not glad that the church is still lying to children.

Rebecca Biblioteca from Mormonish podcast threw together some AI pictures to fill in the gaps in the church's illustrated scripture story. (She loves making AI art. I know that makes her evil in some people's eyes. Artists, am I right?) A lot of people have now gotten hers mixed up with the real ones. They're all based on documented historical facts that the church won't tell children. Well, most of them. The first one is bullshit, but it is a documented manipulation tactic that Joseph used on a least a couple of women.

The other problem with this dishonest indoctrination is that the church is making it much easier for child predators, of which it has no shortage, to copy Joseph's manipulation tactics. "Sometimes God tells us to do hard things," a priesthood leader might tell a child. "Sometimes God tells us to do things that make us feel yucky. Sometimes God tells us to keep secrets." I don't think this is intentional, of course. I think the leaders of the church and the people who design its curricula are just very out of touch with how the real world works and how normal people think. Of course, the part where the church's lawyers protect the church's child predators and fight against their victims in court is always intentional.

Mormon polygamy is weird, but it isn't bad because it's weird, it's bad because it's manipulative, predatory, abusive, and degrading to women and girls. It's indefensible as a divine practice, and the sooner the church gets a clue about that, the better. I don't see that happening for several years, but I think it's inevitable. Just like the church had no choice but to start talking about it in the first place, I think it will have no choice but to come around to the position of Patrick Mason, one of its own leading faithful scholars and apologists, who said that Joseph Smith's polygamy looks like sin and that defending it is like putting lipstick on a pig.

The legal proceedings regarding Elijah McClain's death wrapped up this week, and the paramedics who killed him with an overdose of ketamine are going to jail. That's one of the best Christmas presents I could ask for. It's very rare for healthcare workers to be criminally charged when their stupid mistakes kill people, but they were so obviously and so much in the wrong this time that I've only seen three conservatives bitching about the verdict and blaming McClain for his own death. Do you realize how significant that is? You have to be a saint in order for conservatives to not think you deserve to die after a police encounter, and McClain was. He deserved to be killed about as much as Jesus did.

These convictions will be a game-changer. The Associated Press cautions that they "could have a chilling effect on first responders around the country." To that I say, good. First responders and all other healthcare workers damn well should be afraid to make a stupid mistake that kills someone. If they aren't, they need to choose a profession with more room for error. The obvious problem here was that Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec just didn't care enough to do their job correctly. Well, that and they had an obvious implicit bias against Black men that made them overestimate McClain's weight by almost sixty pounds. The International Association of Fire Fighters claims that this case "criminalized split-second medical decisions." To that I say, bullshit. Cooper and Cichuniec had more than ample time to communicate with McClain and check his vital signs. They didn't even have the ketamine with them when they showed up. But yes, if they had been paralyzed with fear of making a mistake and just not done anything, McClain would still be alive.

They injected him with ketamine because they thought he had "excited delirium." It is unfortunate that paramedics in this country are still being taught that "excited delirium" is a thing even though no legitimate medical institution recognizes it. Just the symptoms of this fictitious condition - superhuman strength, impervious to pain, sudden death - sound so stupid that I can't comprehend how any adult believes in it. But then, millions of adults still worship Donald Trump, so my opinion of the human race, or at least Americans, is obviously too high. Police supporters literally made up "excited delirium" to justify police killings of Black and Latino men in their custody. It's racist as well as stupid. California recently became the first state to ban listing it as a cause of death. Funny how I was raised to believe that California's progressives were the stupid ones.

It is most unfortunate that only one of the three police officers who assaulted McClain for no reason was convicted of anything. Roedema was found guilty because his statement "He's definitely on something," which exemplifies police officers' rampant bigotry against neurodivergent people, contributed to the paramedics' decision. Jason Rosenblatt was acquitted because, like the people at Nuremburg, he was just following orders. Nathan Woodyard, the first police officer who assaulted McClain, was somehow acquitted of everything even though he had no legal justification for stopping McClain, he acknowledged in court that he did everything against his training and needlessly escalated the situation from the first moment, and the paramedics would never have been there in the first place if he had minded his own damn business. So he has his job back. I hope he never has a good night's sleep again. After those acquittals, I was ready to go burn something down if the paramedics were also acquitted. The whole point of having separate trials was so that each person or duo could throw everyone else involved under the bus. If our legal system had determined that nobody was at fault, it would be beyond saving.

So anyway, Merry Christmas. I do mean that, though I don't have much to add.

The other day I learned about something too good to be true - a free, insanely quick, and virtually effortless way for citizens of free countries, like me, to help Iranian revolutionaries and other oppressed people. No, I'm not talking about liking a Facebook page, I mean something that actually helps people. If you install the Tor Snowflake extension on Google Chrome or Firefox, people anywhere in the world can use it to circumvent government censorship of the internet. Download it here. Do it do it do it. The little icon turns green when someone is using it, and it displays the number of people who have used it in the last twenty-four hours. Right now mine is at twelve. The highest it's been is sixteen. Already I've gotten my money's worth out of it. I also embedded it in the code of my website's footer, so I have no idea how but I guess people can visit my website and then use it to do other things. That one says it's helped one person. Good enough for me. We now return to our regularly scheduled post.

Almost the only thing my grandpa does is watch TV, especially since his wife died, so during my recent visit I watched it with him for a few hours every day. It's nice to just be able to enjoy someone's company without talking. Mostly he watches on the YouTube app, and since the search function isn't working very well, nowadays he just scrolls through the recommendations that tend to fall into a few distinct categories that I feel like discussing in no particular order.

I'm not a fan of Fox News but I stuck around for some of it to get out of my echo chamber. And it's not that I think Biden is above criticism. I'm not a die-hard fan or anything. I didn't even vote for him. I just don't notice a lot of things to criticize because I'm too busy being grateful that he's not Donald Trump. So I didn't mind that, but when Tucker Carlson started bashing Volodymyr Zelenskyy, I had to leave the room before I threw something at the TV. Zelenskyy is eight hundred thousand times the man Carlson will ever be. He has more class, courage, and integrity in the dead skin cells he sloughs off in one night than Carlson will manifest in his lifetime. But while millions of his people are losing their homes and their livelihoods, he had the gall to not wear a tie to the White House and to request more military aid, and that triggered this shitflake. (Really, the US is doing the bare minimum required by basic human decency. It should have sent Navy Seals to kill Putin months ago. I'm not even joking. This war is almost entirely his fault, and he has so little support in his own country that his death would probably end it overnight.) Then there was this other guy with his own show, Greg Gutfeld. He's a jerk but sometimes he's pretty funny. So help me, I like him. I guess he reminds me of me.

This show is like a cowboy-themed version of Laugh-In, which I didn't find funny either. A lot of humor from the seventies doesn't seem to land the same way anymore. This even applies somewhat to The Muppet Show, but in that case the goofy characters' delivery saves it, and anyway they're constantly making fun of how bad their show is and that works as a kind of reverse psychology. This also partially explains The Star Wars Holiday Special, though the only thing that can fully explain The Star Wars Holiday Special is lots and lots of drugs. So when I visited for Thanksgiving I just thought Hee Haw was painfully unfunny with some decent music. My sister and brother-in-law concurred. This time, though, I enjoyed several clips and an entire episode from start to finish. Maybe I was just glad not to be watching Fox News. But I thought the same thing I thought the second time I saw The Croods: Either this show got better, or I got stupider. My favorite joke was when this guy showered praises on this lady and she responded to all of his lines with "Olé!" and he asked her why and she said, "That's what they say when the bull comes out."

My grandpa used to watch a lot of Home Free, which is, get this, it will blow your mind, an all-male acapella group that covers other people's songs, but he doesn't anymore for some reason. Now it's usually Ray Stevens. Some of Ray Stevens' songs are hilarious, some are just weird, and some are very right-wing and/or somewhat racist, but fortunately we didn't watch any of those. This is rightly considered one of his best.

These shows live up to their names. Great music and incredible feats abound. I cry sometimes. This time we got a blast from the past watching Susan Boyle. I remember hearing about her appearance on the news in the airport coming back from my high school's Spanish Club trip. I didn't think as much then as I do now about how crappy everyone was toward her before she sang. They didn't even try to hide the fact that they assumed she would suck because she wasn't young and beautiful. People are really awful. Oh yeah, and then there was the teenager that everyone thought would suck because he was fat, and he put them in their place. But then Simon Cowell suggested that he should dump his friend who supported him through everything and just did the duet with him, because he was phenomenal and she was just good and she would hold him back, and she was standing right there pretending not to be hurt. What a jerk. Oh, here's a nice clip that made me cry. I watched it at Thanksgiving but that's close enough.

I've watched bits and pieces of Western movies with my grandpa. When I was there for Thanksgiving I watched Hang 'Em High in its entirety. This time I watched Sonny and Jed (originally La Banda J.&S.) in its entirety. A brief synopsis with spoilers follows.

Jed is an outlaw who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. He also swears a lot more than necessary. Sonny rescues him from the sheriff and says she wants to join him. The second time he talks to her, he's surprised to realize she's a woman, which surprised me because it was pretty obvious, but then I remembered that this movie is set in an era when women weren't supposed to be cowboys. But he also makes a weird joke about her being "castrated at birth" and for a couple minutes I thought he was serious and that it was going to be an interesting plot point. Anyway, as soon as he finds out she's a woman he's like "Do you know what I do to females?" and then tries to rape her but gives up in disgust when he discerns, through some means I don't want to know, that she's a virgin. At that point, for me, Jed crosses the line from anti-hero or likeable villain to someone whose death I'll actively root for throughout the rest of the movie. His redeeming qualities don't balance out this monstrous act. But Sonny keeps following him anyway.

He belittles her nearly every time he opens his mouth, whether he's addressing her or someone else in front of her. At one point his brothel-owning friend wants to buy her and pins her to a bed and tries to take her clothes off, and he just sits back and watches for an uncomfortable length of time before intervening, at which point she's crying not because of trauma but because she loves him. They get married and immediately rob the priest, which is pretty funny. Then there are some more funny scenes of them robbing people as a couple. I feel like this should have been the focus of the movie, but it doesn't last very long. He's nicer to her for a while but then he's a jerk again. Eventually she betrays him to the sheriff, then rescues him from the sheriff (again), then leaves him while he hobbles behind on his injured leg and begs her to come back. Earlier in the movie he told her to walk five feet behind him "like a dog;" now she tells him the same thing.

The best part of the movie is a recurring motif in Ennio Morricone's score with a banjo and then voices singing, "Sonny... Sonny..." Not Jed, which is just as well, as he doesn't deserve to have his name in a song. It's like unseen angels urging Sonny to get out of this terrible relationship. I'd have to go back and keep track of when it comes up to guess at its actual intended meaning.

We took a break from YouTube to watch two of the finest Christmas movies ever made on VHS (ask your parents what that is) - The Muppet Christmas Carol (without the heart-wrenching musical number "When Love is Found" wrongfully excised) and It's a Wonderful Life. They both made me cry. I was a wreck, y'all. The next day, Christmas Day, I suggested Miracle on 34th Street and we looked on Netflix but it wasn't there so instead we watched Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas instead. Then my grandpa just scrolled through Netflix and asked if there was anything I wanted to watch. I saw The Man from Toronto and mentioned that it was funny, so he put it on, and I realized with some chagrin that it's not nearly as funny when I'm not watching it with a bunch of college-aged friends, and this was the day before we watched Sonny and Jed so I wasn't sure how comfortable he'd be with the content, but he slept through most of it anyway.

Out of a silly concern for people's privacy, I used to give pseudonyms to everyone I wrote about on my blog. So when I wrote about my group from Shanan Ballam's Fall 2015 Poetry Writing course, I gave the members stupid pseudonyms: Bracelets, Redhead, and Glasses. And then Bracelets was the only one I wrote about consistently but I think I did mention the others once each. Anyway, I hate those nicknames now, so I'm going to come clean. Their names are Lauren, Clara, and Joe. That felt weird. I called Lauren "Bracelets" because she wore lots of bracelets on both arms, as well as hats with big, floppy brims and other generally fabulous clothing. She liked to be fabulous, but she wasn't conceited or anything. She was responsible for the formation of our group when she said those of us who happened to sit near her on the first day of class should just be a group, so she shaped my life in some ways with that thoughtless act. She also became a fan of my blog and more than once the only reason I continued writing it every week despite its very underwhelming performance. I would have given up back then, a few months after starting, but because of her I didn't, and now I've sunk too much time and energy into it to give up despite the paltry returns on my effort being nowhere near worth it. Thanks, Lauren, I say sarcastically.

On my phone, she was and remains listed as "Lady Lauren" because she had an affinity for the romanticized version of the Middle Ages that we all know never really existed. I don't even remember why, but she once told me, "You're my knight in shining armor." And I told another woman about that and the other woman said, "Dude, either she likes you, or you're really deep in the friend zone." Women are allowed to say "friend zone" unironically without getting their heads bitten off because reasons. But Lauren was just big on being a lady and being treated like a lady and stuff. In her phone, I discovered one day that I was listed as "Christopher Aspie Friend". I posted on Facebook, "Today I found out that my crush has me listed in her phone as 'Christopher Aspie Friend'. I'm not sure how I feel about that." I felt safe posting it because Lauren didn't have Facebook. A couple months later, some random lady liked the post. The random lady, upon investigation, turned out to be Lauren's mother.

I think I'm still listed as "Christopher Aspie Friend", and I'm torn between wanting to keep it that way for nostalgia's sake and wanting to change it because I now know that Hans Asperger collaborated with the Nazis by knowingly referring children with disabilities to be murdered at the Am Spiegelgrund clinic. (Nobody knew this in 2015.) I have ceased using Aspie or Asperger's as a descriptor in any other context.

​I never mentioned on my blog how she broke my heart, but I did cryptically allude to it with some very melodramatic language that's still better poetry than any of the actual poetry I wrote for our poetry class. Around that time, though, I saw Disney's Inside Out and learned that it's okay to be sad sometimes, and that was powerful. She started dating the guy she'd called "basically my brother" and then that ended but I still didn't have a chance. Anyway, we remained good friends but we argued sometimes because I got frustrated with her sometimes. I won't talk about why because I don't want to criticize her, and I'm sure she had legitimate reasons to be frustrated with me too, and I didn't fully appreciate the toll that the hardship she was going through must have taken. Let's just say we weren't great at communicating. We stayed in touch after she graduated and moved on, and I got her into the Star Wars fandom and found out she was already in the Legend of Zelda fandom, but sometimes she stopped responding to texts for months at a time and I still don't know why. I have another friend who was like that for the better part of a decade, but it was because she periodically relapsed into heroin and felt embarrassed to talk to me, so I don't know what the deal was here.

Most recently, Lauren stopped responding for about twenty-six months. In late 2019 I was texting her once a week with no response, and then in early 2020 I told her to have a nice life, which, even though it sounds like a nice thing to say, is actually a rude thing to say. My frustration this time around stemmed in large part from waiting indefinitely on the feedback she had promised for the book that I'd sent her in April and she'd finished reading in July or so. I still texted her happy Easter 2020 and then in October 2020 I texted her to mention that I had a dream where she told me why she'd disappeared for a year, and I was very disappointed when I woke up. But I just accepted that she would probably not be part of my life again and I didn't know why. I didn't expect anything to happen when I texted her Merry Christmas this year. And nothing did happen for three days. But then -

So this was a really, really nice surprise. I do hope she'll stick around for a while. I haven't asked about why she disappeared or why she didn't give me feedback on my book, and I'm sure I will at some point but first and foremost I'm just grateful to have her back and I have no hard feelings whatsoever. I value her friendship very much. I don't even feel like my former romantic interest in her was a complete waste of time like most of my romantic interests have been. Her kindness, her intelligence, her thoughtfulness, and her sense of humor, besides just generally making her a good person to associate with and a positive influence on my life, have helped to shape my vision of the kind of woman I'm going to marry. The thing I like most about her sense of humor is how we can take a joke that isn't all that funny and play along with it so seriously that our seriousness about the joke becomes the joke. Anyway, maybe I can't adequately convey what I'm trying to convey in this post to those who haven't met her, but our reconnection is the greatest thing that's happened to me for a while and though it came out of the blue, I'm sure I was prompted to text her Merry Christmas, and it increases my confidence in the glorious promises God has made me if I can just be patient and stay close to Him.

This will be a brief and not particularly good post because I'm on vacation and I don't want to put in a lot of time or effort (insert your own quip about my usual lack of effort here). I went to the usual place for Christmas this year, though now it's just my grandpa's house since my grandma died a few months ago. Since my aunts moved out, their rooms have been reclaimed and one is a guest room that I used this time around. They had a snowstorm and then the window blinds were too weak to block out most of the light reflecting off the snow, which made for a hellish time trying to sleep, but the window was almost the exact right size to stuff with four long pillows that were in the room. I'm a genius. The shelf in the closet was lined with binders full of looseleaf papers containing my great-grandma's journals. Being the incurable narcissist that I am, I made an immediate beeline for June 23, 1993.

It says: "Denece called this morning to say that Brenda had her baby about 5:30 this morning after a long labor, all night - Yesterday when she went for her check-up, her bag of water was leaking and so the doctor put her in the hospital - There was a staph germ present, and the doctor was afraid the baby would get it, so he induced labor - It was no fun! So have this 7 lb 12 oz baby boy, Christopher Randall Nicholson, our first great-grandchild - Brenda said he is the cutest, sweetest baby in the world - She sounds like a devoted mother! and we are glad. Dale is walking on air."

Well, that's nice. I suppose I could have just asked, but I didn't know all those details. I didn't know what time I was born, for example. Years ago I noticed a newcomer to my ward filling out her information on a blue sheet with "I am a girl" written at the top instead of the customary pink sheet because "Colors are not gendered" and "I like blue better," and then I noticed that she had the same birthday as me, and she asked what time I was born, and I didn't know so I had to cover up my ignorance by saying, "I don't remember. I was very young." She stared at me for a moment, then said "Oh, stop it" and turned away to talk to someone else.

On Christmas Eve I went to see the Spider-Man movie with my brother-in-law. It did not disappoint. Then I went to bed, woke up, and couldn't get back to sleep because I hadn't yet figured out to stuff the window with pillows. Then as I lay in bed feeling like garbage while everyone else was up doing Christmas things, I made the mistake of getting on Facebook and seeing eight hundred pictures of happy couples. Even the heathens I went to high school with are settling down and raising families by now. But the day was turned around by getting to collaborate with family members on a 1,000-piece Lego puzzle.

My heart was also warmed by the continued loyalty of true friends.

That night I had a great prayer and cried a lot. I almost never cry, and it feels so very, very good when I do. So that was nice. Someday hopefully I'll be at liberty to write all about what I said and why I cried.