I had the best experience yet getting high last week, but I'm not getting high today because I've decided to take a break for at least two weeks so I don't destroy my brain's pleasure center. Some of my family members are wary about me using drugs, and some people get addicted and get into worse drugs and ruin their lives and stuff, and I ought to be more cautious about that. To be clear, though a part of me does enjoy telling people I got high because it's taboo and "bad," I don't do it for pleasure or to escape from my unpleasant emotions. I do get pleasure and escape from my unpleasant emotions, and I won't apologize for that, but I do it for spirituality. And though I can't prove it, I think the intentions and the preparation that I've brought to this have shaped the experiences I get out of it and made me less susceptable to the potential pitfalls. I came for spirituality, and I got it. I use the drugs as part of my journey, not a crutch or a shortcut. But drugs are not toys, and I'm sure they're not right for everyone even if they're right for me. I'm not encouraging anyone to use them.

This last time, I felt like I was in contact with the spirit world, reaching out to other people's consciousnesses, people I used to know and people I still know, learning about the plans we'd made in the premortal existence, apologizing for how I'd wronged them. I spoke to them with my thoughts. I'm sure none of them heard me. I'd love to know if any of them felt anything at all. I also got an impression that I might die in three days, and then I felt like I was pleading my case to some unseen, unheard personage (not God, I don't think, but maybe, who knows) about why I needed more time and could do so much more to bless people's lives while I'm here. I didn't die in three days, but I don't think that was ever really going to happen. I feel like I just needed to prove to myself how much I want to be here. (For now. After I do die, I sure as hell don't want to come back.) Even though it was just my own brain talking, it felt like a revelatory experience. I'm well aware that I might have just been delusional, but I've already lost much of my fear of death, made peace with a very traumatic past event, and made positive changes in my life as a result, so maybe the world could use more of that kind of delusions.

And I had another little psychic moment that helped to validate the experience for me. I'm not making any real effort to get a girlfriend, but once in a while I'll get on Bumble and swipe for a minute. I can always see that a few women have swiped right on me, but I can't see who they are because I won't pay for Premium, so I just have to hope I'll stumble across them in the natural course of things, which rarely happens. This time, I looked at the first woman who came up, reached out to her consciousness, and somehow found things to say about her profile for fifteen minutes or so. During this time I came to an implicit understanding that she had swiped right on me. And finally I was like Well, I'll feel pretty stupid if she didn't swipe right on me. I swiped right on her, and boom, we had a match. And then she never messaged me, but it was still cool. I also telepathically thanked a woman who had stopped messaging me for briefly coming into my life to tell me I had "the most soulful eyes." I also gently telepathically scolded a woman from Ukraine who said she was "apolitical" even though one American party supports her country and the other does not. I was nice about it, but I was in tears as I pleaded with her to take more civic responsibility.

I debated how much to share because this is my special personal experience that doesn't need to be broadcast to the world, but I do want to share things that might benefit and uplift others in their own spiritual quests. I decided to err on the side of not broadcasting it because I'm too lazy to try to describe this experience in words. You'd never be able to feel its intensity through words alone. So I'll just mention one more thing. I got the real or perceived revelation that Donald Trump chose to play a villainous role in this life so that others could have the opportunity to exercise moral goodness by fighting against him. Obviously I was inspired by the claims of near death experiencers that this life is like a play and we're all just performing roles. Whether my insight into Trump is objectively accurate, I can't say, but it makes me hate him less, so I'll stick with it. I thought, I hope I'm not a villain. And then I immediately thought, I am to some people.

I'm on vacation with my grandparents in New York for a couple of weeks, and I'm not going to put much effort into this post. My first flight was delayed by two and a half hours, which would cause me to miss my second flight, so American Airlines' system automatically rebooked me on an overnight flight arriving at 6 a.m. without telling me. The bag check-in lady was able to get me on another delayed flight to Dallas instead of Chicago, and I made to the end of the boarding line with a few minutes to spare. I would like to add my complaint to the many complaints about the Salt Lake airport. I cannot comprehend why I had to walk through empty space for twenty minutes to get to my gate. Why the hell didn't they put the gates in that empty space instead of the empty space? How the hell did this arrangement get designed, approved, and built? I hope everyone involved never works in their respective industries again.

So now I've been to Texas. I have no other reason to want to go to Texas because its governor is a bellend. I had five hours to kill at the airport because my second rescheduled flight was, of course, delayed, and I walked around for a while and I worked on the new book that I just started for a while. I sat with my computer at a charging station by the gate and paid no attention to the pretty young woman seated across from me until a guy across the room yelled at his kids for running around, and I looked over there, and she grinned at me and said, "They're losing their shit!" And I said I couldn't blame them for being bored, and she agreed. And then it occurred to me that I could keep talking to her by asking how long she'd been delayed and stuff, but it also occurred to me that just because a woman spoke to me didn't mean she wanted to have a whole conversation, so I didn't. She went back to her work, and then she went off somewhere.

When it was time to board, I was in the second-to-last group, so I didn't get in line. She returned and also didn't get in line. As I waited, my eyes wandered around and didn't look at her. But then they did look at her, and it seems like she was looking at me before that, because she immediately looked away as an involuntary smile sprouted on her face. I mean, I wasn't in her head and I don't know what the synapses in her brain were doing, but her smile looked involuntary based on my short lifetime of observations and personal experience. I've had the exact same reaction when someone I found attractive looked at me. So this brought me to the realization that, against all odds, she probably found me attractive. Though unusual, this would not be unprecedented. I've been asked to ladies' choice dances. I've been flirted with and realized it years later. That girl in the USU library in 2013 who started a friendly conversation by asking me about a simple point of grammar that she could have taken a few seconds to look up on her computer was probably flirting with me.

I kept waiting for this pretty young woman to get in line, but she kept not getting in line, so I got in line and then she got in line right behind me. And the line moved slowly, and I made a point of pretending not to notice or care about her presence, although sometimes I would turn my head so I could kind of see her and she could see that I could see her and she could talk to me if she wanted. I didn't dare to talk to her. Bad things happen to me when I have that kind of confidence. I imagined her getting on one of the feminist subreddits I frequent and complaining that she can't go out in public without men being attracted to her. Really, I see complaints like that. Apparently some women hate being approached by men in public at all, even if the men don't harass them or refuse to take no for an answer. And they hate it when their guy friends turn out to be attracted to them, even if their guy friends don't harass them or refuse to take no for an answer. Maybe I'm a misogynist for not feeling even a little bit sorry for those women.

As she stood behind me in line and I let her into my peripheral vision, this woman twirled a lock of her hair in an exaggerated manner. This was a less obvious sign of attraction, since I couldn't prove that it had anything to do with me, but nobody else was twirling their hair, and it's such a well-established sign of attraction that it inspired a hilarious Argentinian commercial where a guy has dinner with his girlfriend's family and charms her mother, grandmother, and father so much that they all do it. (Her father has short hair, but he grows a long lock just for that shot.) I became hopeful that since we seemed to be in the same boarding category, we would sit together, and then it wouldn't be weird for me to talk to her. Her seat was several rows up from mine. I decided I would muster my courage during the three-hour flight and talk to her at the baggage claim. She wasn't at the baggage claim. I hate being me.

She probably thinks I wasn't attracted to her and/or failed to pick up on her signals. The first one isn't true, and surprisingly, neither is the second. A third, less likely possibility is that she thinks I'm a weird Republican who refused to flirt back without verification of her chromosomes. I don't want her to think those things. But because I think almost constantly about death and what may await us afterward, it occurred to me almost immediately that maybe when she dies she'll have one of those life reviews that many people describe after they die and come back, and she'll revisit our brief moments together and see my thoughts and feelings and finally know the truth. Maybe she'll know that I thought she was very pretty. Maybe she'll know that her unsolicited vulgar remark gave me a positive impression of her personality. And maybe she'll glimpse the ocean of trauma that made me fear her more than I fear being alone.

Even if his remark earlier this year about encouraging white people to stay the hell away from Black people was taken out of context and not racist at all, it's pretty well-established that cartoonist Scott Adams is a massive dick. And that's a shame because his comic strip is one of the greatest ever produced. My dad, a mechanical engineer, had three Dilbert collections - Bring Me the Head of Willy the Mailboy!, Still Pumped from Using the Mouse, and Fugitive from the Cubicle Police - and even as a kid who lacked the breadth and depth of knowledge to understand several of the strips, I found enough hilarity in them to read them several times. Here I share a sampling of the ones I didn't understand. Specifically, I share the edgiest and most shocking ones that I was too innocent to understand because they're the funniest. I can't believe some of these were allowed to run in newspapers.

After getting canceled, Scott Adams removed the searchable archive from dilbert.com, so in order to make this post I downloaded all the strips and read them from the beginning. I'm almost finished with the nineties and I've covered the timeframe of my dad's books. As an adult, I find that I appreciate all the more how funny and clever this strip was, especially in the early years before it focused exclusively on workplace humor and showcased Dilbert and Dogbert in all kinds of wacky situations. It covers the spectrum from scathing satire to unapologetically cheap puns, and there were so many off-topic specimens that I wanted to share simply for being brilliant. I also found that, despite very much not being an engineer, I relate a lot to the protagonist. I relate to the way he painstakingly analyzes social situations and fails at them anyway, the way he geeks out over his interests while nobody else gives a shit, the way women treat him, and so on. Not that he isn't also a dick sometimes, but aren't we all?

I recently arranged to hang out with someone from my ward because I didn't look forward to being alone for every hour of spring break and she seemed like a safe person to talk to about some stuff. We were going to go for a walk but when she had to work late, we went to dinner instead. It wasn't a date. I made sure to tell her up front that I was only seeking friendship, so she wouldn't have to wonder about my intentions, and she appreciated that. She told me about her awkward drama with two guys from the ward who are competing for her affections. If I needed a reminder of how grateful I am to not have anything to do with the world of dating anymore, which I didn't, that would have sufficed. I felt bad for them but also amused that someone besides me is going to suffer this time.

I told her that I just recently came to the conclusion that I simply straight-up don't believe in some teachings and claims of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A lot of people wouldn't see that as earth-shattering. Members who don't believe every single part are the rule, not the exception. But I tried for a really long time to avoid that route because I saw it as logically untenable to pick and choose parts of a religion that claims to be the only true and living church, the kingdom of God, uniquely led by revelation. It's all or nothing, I thought. But I grew tired of trying to make certain things work or pretend they made sense, so here I am. And I hesitated to share that fact with anyone. As invisible as I feel pretty much all the time, I know that a few people in and out of the church, including some who don't even believe in God, admire me as a truth seeker and an example of balancing faith and reason. I didn't want to shake anyone's faith, or to be seen as a hypocrite or as proof that faith and reason can't be balanced after all. I picked this person to confide in because I knew she wouldn't judge me and she didn't have enough preconceived notions to be too disappointed. She asked for examples of what I don't believe anymore. I said, "I don't believe that same-sex relationships are wrong." Without skipping a beat she was like, "Yeah, me neither."

The Church's opposition to homosexuality - which in fairness, it shared until pretty recently with the entire Judeo-Christian world - has bothered me a lot for a little over a decade, ever since I befriended a real live lesbian who shockingly didn't appreciate being told that God wanted her to pursue a life of celibacy. (I didn't volunteer that information, thank goodness. I didn't even know she was a lesbian yet. She asked me "What are your thoughts on gays?" and I told her and she said "Houston, we have a problem.") As I talked to her, the horrible real life implications of the glib phrase "The attraction isn't a sin, but acting on it is" - an improvement on the Church's previous stance of "Homosexuality is a curable pathology" - suddenly sunk in. Still, I remained agnostic about it. I tried to maintain some epistemological humility and not claim with certainty that the Church's position was wrong. God's ways are not my ways. Just because I and countless others find something deeply confusing and hurtful, I told myself, doesn't mean it isn't from God. I listened to countless rationalizations and obfuscations from happily married straight people about why it isn't as fundamentally unfair as they know it is. I decided I would just love people and not judge their lifestyle choices, and if God didn't like their lifestyle choices, that was His problem, not mine. And I continued to experience cognitive dissonance every time I became aware of yet another gay person who had left the Church because its teachings made him or her miserable.

The tipping point actually came last week when the final speaker at the Logan Institute's LGBTQ+ and allies seminar, a happily married straight man, gave everyone a handout of quotes that were supposed to rationalize and obfuscate the fundamental unfairness of the Church's position but had the opposite effect on me. For example:

Robert George: "If one believes that 'sexual orientation' or 'gender identity' truly is central to one's identity or being, then The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' teaching about marriage and family, including but not limited to the Proclamation on the Family, will always be highly problematic and, indeed, mysterious. It will be defensible, if at all, sheerly by appeal to authority." Okay, so sexual orientation per se is a pretty modern construct, but people have had varying kinds of sexual attraction for as long as people have existed, and how can that not be central to one's identity or being in some way if marriage and sex are central to God's plan? How can the purpose of one's existence be uncoupled (no pun intended) from the internal motivation to take part in it (or not)? Dr. George is certainly correct about the appeal to authority - though apologists have tried to fill in the gaps, church leaders themselves have made little if any serious attempt to explain or defend the Church's stance on homosexuality beyond "God said so."

N.T. Wright: "We have lived for too long in a world, and tragically even in a church, where the wills and affections of human beings are regarded as sacrosanct as they stand, where God is required to command what we already love and to promise what we already desire. The implicit religion of many people today is simply to discover who they really are and then try to live it out." I believe this statement, and yet when applied in this context, it singles out (no pun intended) a small segment of the population (percentage-wise) and holds them to a different standard than most people. If you're part of the heterosexual majority, then in this context God is regarding your wills and affections as sacrosanct to a significant extent. He is commanding what you already love and promising what you already desire. Maybe you won't be able to find someone, but that's because of bad luck, not because He doesn't want you to and forbade you from trying. Oh, and there's also the small detail that people's sexual and romantic wills and affections are typically the ones God gave them in the first place.

Robert Johnson: It's become increasingly common to believe that one "mortal human being has the responsibility for making our lives whole, keeping us happy, making our lives meaningful, intense, and ecstatic." Stephanie Coontz (misspelled Coonz): "Never before in history had societies thought that such a set of high expectations about marriage was either realistic or desirable." Maybe Latter-day Saints get this idea because the Church teaches that marriage is the most important thing in the universe and, once entered into, should be one's highest priority at all times. I thought this quote was on the list to imply that gay people shouldn't make such a big deal out of marriage because it isn't all that great, which would be pretty freaking hypocritical. After looking at the original article and its brief mention of LGBT+ individuals, though, I think it's on the list to imply (even though neither of the people quoted were talking about this) that gay people shouldn't mind dating and marrying the opposite sex without getting to enjoy any of the romantic feelings or attraction that straight people take for granted, and which gay people also get to enjoy when they date and marry the same sex.

So now I've had no choice but to change my mind. God's commandments can sometimes be very difficult to follow, but I'm pretty sure they aren't supposed to be a constant source of avoidable pain and trauma. The fruits of the Church's teachings on this subject tell me loud and clear that they aren't from God. If they are, then it seems to me that celibate gay members should find happiness and inner peace that outweigh the benefits of being in a relationship, and those who leave to pursue gay lifestyles (assuming they would even still want to) should feel empty inside and want to come back. From what I've seen, this is overwhelmingly not the case. (Of course there are rare exceptions on both sides, and there is sometimes middle ground. John Gustav-Wrathall was excommunicated in 2005, and has continued to attend church every week with his husband. Tom Christofferson broke up with his long-term boyfriend to get rebaptized, and now he's dating men again because he got lonely. A gay friend of mine is zealous about the gospel and committed to celibacy, and on my birthday he told me he was interested and kissed me on the lips.) The bottom line for me is that the gospel is supposed to work for all of God's children and the Church is supposed to be a healthy place for all of God's children, but it doesn't and it isn't, and consequently something needs to change. I don't presume to know exactly what, but something.

Even if it's true that opposite-sex marriage is a requirement for exaltation in the highest degree of heaven, and consequently the only form of marriage that can be sealed for eternity in the temple, it doesn't logically follow that a temporary same-sex marriage is worse than no marriage at all. On the contrary, since same-sex love and relationships are every bit as real and meaningful as opposite-sex love and relationships, a same-sex marriage that ends at death still provides the personal growth and development between two imperfect people that I believe is the main purpose of marriage. (I'm pretty sure that reproduction is not the main purpose of marriage, which every non-human organism on the planet gets along just fine without.) The Church could keep its temple sealing policies and teachings about the hereafter, and still stop punishing gay members for doing what makes them happy. This would still confer a kind of second-class status on gay members and be unsatisfactory to a lot of people, but it would be an astronomical improvement. In 1948 BYU students Kent Goodridge Taylor and Richard Snow told President George Albert Smith that they were in love with each other, and he told them to live their lives as best they could. Of course, that was a few years before gay people in the US started agitating en masse to be treated like human beings, which apparently frightened church leaders and sparked the rampant homophobia and witch hunts of the 1960s and 70s.

And even if my fallible mortal logic is wrong and it is true that marrying the wrong person somehow gets you farther away from exaltation than being alone, I don't believe that any God worthy of the title would be more concerned about chastity violations between people who love each other than about, say, the LGBTQ+ suicide rate. So there's the whole matter of priorities too. Again, not a perfect solution, but there is ancient and modern scriptural precedent for God allowing people to live a "lower law" when the "higher law" proves impossible for them.

My friend asked, "Are you a pretty logical thinker?" I said, "Yeah." She said, "That makes it hard." And then I complained about the hostility I frequently encounter in the Church to critical thinking or any kind of nuance whatsoever, as exemplified in recent remarks by Brad Wilcox and Wendy Nelson. My friend hadn't heard about the latter, and she smiled and shook her head when I described them. And then that led her to the topic that I would have brought up next anyway. She brought up a Sunday school lesson that our bishop taught last year, which I've complained about on this blog multiple times, but I had gotten over it and I'm only bringing it up again because she did. In this lesson he very forcefully asserted that God wants all married women to work unpaid 96-hour weeks as homemakers, and told the women present to only use their college educations to be better mothers, not to have careers (emphasis his). My friend remembered him saying that people who disagreed were "babies" in their understanding. I don't remember that, but I remember him saying that we were following the "natural man" and the world's lies, so the same general idea. I was very concerned about the women who sat through this nonsense. I was concerned that those who recognized it as nonsense would leave the Church, and those who didn't would either give up their dreams, feel guilty for having dreams, or feel guilty when modern economic realities forced them to have careers whether they wanted to or not. Now I know how two of them reacted. My friend said that she and her roommate were both angry about it, and then she went home and bawled.

Hearing that also made me angry all over again - about the lesson, and about the total lack of any retraction, correction, or apology to those harmed, because we don't seem to mean it when we say we don't believe that our leaders are infallible. A few months later, referencing my complaint to the stake president, the bishop privately acknowledged to me that "We all make mistakes," but my friend and I are pretty sure he still doesn't think he said anything wrong. She was chill about it, though. She said we don't have to believe everything we hear, and if something feels wrong, it probably is. She shared another experience in another ward when the principle of modesty was, as per bloody usual, taught completely wrong by telling the women they needed to cover up to help men control their thoughts. (Jesus would have told the men to pluck their eyes out if they had a problem.) And she was upset, but that very week she saw a quote in institute that she was able to take to her bishop to convince him that this was the wrong way to teach modesty, and he asked how she would teach it and asked her to prepare a lesson, and she was terrified but she got a reprieve from the you-know-what pandemic. Because of her taking this stand, though, when the time came for her mother (who had originally seen nothing wrong with the modesty lesson) to require the young women at some church activity or other to wear shirts over their bathing suits, she refused. My friend said people like us need to be here to take stands like that and to create space for others who otherwise wouldn't be welcome. I agree. It just feels at times like a ridiculous burden that we don't deserve, especially when less nuanced members and leaders openly resent us as they push the culture in the opposite direction.

I told her about how I had become an out-and-out feminist in the last couple years because of my ex-neighbor Calise, who probably still has no idea that she had this effect on me. (This friend already knew something of the less positive effects that Calise had on me and had said that she "sounds like a butthead," so I jumped at the chance to give a more nuanced picture.) Because of her, I started to question things that I had never questioned because they were conditioned into me. Calise made the most beautiful artwork and she wanted to be a teacher and share her passion with children. It made me sick to think that anyone would tell her not to use that God-given talent because she had a one-size-fits-all role to change diapers, wash dishes, and so on. My friend said that she really appreciates men like me. That was nice. She said we have "a lot of very conservative men" in our ward and that the ones in our home evening group have made several "domineering comments" and she finally called them out on it. I stopped going to Elders' Quorum for a while in part because of sexist comments like the high councillor's assertion that his wife "understood her role as a homemaker" and that her career was to follow him wherever his career took him. They weren't frequent by any means, but I felt like life was too short to gamble every other week on whether or not one would pop up.

I said, "The whole thing about the man being the breadwinner and the woman staying home..." "...is bullcrap," she interrupted. I was going to say "...only solidified after World War II and was only feasible for white Americans of a certain social class where women could afford to stay home instead of working as housekeepers for wealthier families," but I guess her more concise version covered that. Of course, I don't think it's bullcrap if/when a heterosexual couple decides with equal input and without coercion that it's the right option for their specific circumstances, but it is bullcrap when preached as God's eternal model for everyone ever. So anyway, I've come to the conclusion that I don't believe anything the Church teaches about gender roles. It's lost all credibility on that subject for me because its current teachings are just a watered-down version of more egregiously sexist teachings from a few decades ago (that some people are still perpetuating). And while men and women are obviously different, everyone is an individual and you simply cannot make any generalization about one or the other that will always be true. (Not to mention that many differences stem more from culture and upbringing than biology.)

I could have gone on about things I don't believe anymore, but my friend asked what I do still believe. So I started listing those off. I believe the basic theology, which, although I don't often say so because I have no interest in denigrating other faiths, in my opinion is the most complete and makes the most sense of any Christian theology. As an example, I mentioned the teaching that some part of our identities, which Joseph Smith called "intelligences," is uncreated and co-eternal with God. This resolves the theological problem that if God created us from scratch, it's His fault that we aren't perfect and His fault that we sin. I don't know if she ever considered that before but she looked impressed. I believe in the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith. For whatever reason, after saying that I felt a need to reassure her that I don't like polygamy. It's one of the major issues that keeps a lot of people up at night but doesn't bother me much for some reason, but if I were a woman like my friend it would probably bother me more, so I felt like I needed to be sensitive to that after mentioning that I don't have any real problems with Joseph Smith. So we got on a tangent about that because she said that she doesn't like it either but she thinks it was necessary for a time and she just recently learned about how it empowered plural wives to take turns going back East to get college educations. I said, "The Church was more feminist in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth." She said, "Ohhh yeah."

She had said she needed to be back around 6:45, but when I glanced at my phone at 6:35, she told me not to worry about it, to take my time. We left around quarter after seven. I had a delightful time and appreciated her empathy and thoughtfulness very much. I am starving for these intellectual discussions that I can't have at church or with my family. She said she thought I wasn't giving myself enough credit for everything I still believe. I agreed and no longer felt like it was a big deal to share this with both of the people who read my blog.

Last week some guys from my ward were bragging about how many guys they've kissed and the smaller numbers of girls they've kissed and trying to guess how many guys some girls in the ward have kissed. Their guesses were way off. One girl had kissed zero guys, and I asked if she was waiting until she's over the altar, and she got huffy and people laughed and I thought No, wait, I was just surprised, I was just curious, I wasn't trying to be mean this time. I would never tease about such a potentially sensitive subject. I also had to say my number, and the number was five, and then I figured that's as good a reason as any to write this post that's been sitting in my drafts for twenty-one months. These are those five. Not that the number itself is particularly impressive, but the stories behind it sure are a lot less so.

Mary was at least in fourth grade, maybe sixth, when I was in kindergarten. We rode the same school bus. She had an equally attractive sister in my class, but I was far more interested in older women thanks to the sister missionaries who used to put me on their laps and tickle me. Bullies had not yet destroyed my confidence or turned me into an introvert, so every afternoon when she got off the bus I yelled, "Bye Mary, I love you!" And then one day some older boys thought it would be funny to restrain her so I could kiss her. Nobody taught me about consent when I was five years old, okay? I'm sorry. At least I only kissed her on the wrist. It was the easiest part to reach as she tried to get away. Ugh, I'm going to hell.

For a couple years before they moved from New York to Utah, my family often hung out with the Davis family. Their daughter Natalie was probably twice my age. She had a twin sister, but I knew which was which and I knew which one I wanted. She also had a sister my age, but see my previous comment about missionaries, and also I thought her sister my age was annoying. All of us kids slept on the Davises' trampoline one night, and Natalie told us a creepy/humorous story about a creepy voice that said "I gotcha, where I wantcha, and now I'm gonna eatcha," and her doing that voice gave me a mild case of vorarephilia before I came to my senses. Long story short, one day we were at a Primary activity at a park somewhere and I decided to make my move. Natalie was sitting and talking to a friend, which enabled me to reach her cheek with my lips.

Natalie's friend:

Natalie: "It's okay, we're related."

​Me:

Yeah, so I had missed the discussion where our families had found out that her grandfather was my mom's grandfather's brother, or something like that, I don't remember. It was something distant enough that we still could have gotten married, but c'est la vie.

Even though she was a few years younger, I danced with Kristin at a school dance one evening and decided for whatever reason that I wanted to kiss her, but by this time I was mature enough to at least take into account the possibility that she didn't want me to kiss her, so after stressing about it a little I compromised by kissing the top of her head as she walked away. She giggled and kept walking. That was probably some time before I asked her to prom and she couldn't go because she was grounded. It was quite a while before she reached out on Facebook, having ignored me for years, and gave me her sob stories and asked for money and came up with excuse after excuse for why she couldn't pay me back when she said she would and needed more money. Long story short, she ruined my life for a long time and by the end owed me more than six thousand dollars (every penny of which, surprise surprise, she still owes me). She said she thought to ask me for help because she remembered that I was "nice" in high school. I wish I had been mean to her like everyone else.

USU has a tradition called True Aggie Night where you stand on a big letter A next to the building with another big letter A on top during a full moon and you kiss a True Aggie to become a True Aggie. I accomplished this during my first week of college ever. I just showed up by myself and got lucky. As I loitered in the crowd, Natalie Hinton asked me something like, "Did you go to Skyview High School?" And I said something like, "No. Are you a True Aggie? Do you want to kiss me?" (I now know that during the first week of school, the requirement for one party to be a True Aggie is waived, but oh well, at least I covered my bases.) And I stressed about it a little, but it was over really fast. I knew her name because she signed a little card attesting what she had done to me. I scanned this card once upon a time but I can't find the scan now, and the card was destroyed in a washing machine, leaving no more evidence for this story than any of my others. We became Facebook friends and she was in my anthropology class a year later but I never talked to her again and we aren't Facebook friends anymore.

I swear on the holy books of every religion in the world that this is true. Once I had a roommate who had a woman spend the night, and after a few weeks I realized she wasn't going to leave. The landlord didn't care. I don't know if she paid rent. I know she didn't pitch in for utilities, and my roommate flipped out on me when I suggested it. Anyway, at some point she somehow got it into her head that I should kiss her "so that you can say you've kissed a black girl, and I can say I've kissed a white guy." My roommate did not find that logic convincing. They argued about it in front of me, with her being like "Come here" and him being like "Don't you dare" and me wondering when Allen Funt was going to jump out of the couch. She had to compromise, and brought in one of her black girl friends to kiss me instead. She filmed it. I'm not in touch with her and I've never seen the video, so there's no more evidence for this story than any of my others. Afterward her friend said, "You're a good kisser." I thought, I have almost zero experience; you don't have to lie to make me feel good.

I almost forgot about this one. I guess I have to count it. I'll keep him anonymous since he isn't out to his family. On my birthday he told me he was interested in me, and that he knew he probably wasn't my type, but he'd like to kiss me, and when I didn't say anything for a moment he took that as permission. It wasn't, but whatever. Karma. Later he apologized for making my birthday about himself and asked why I let him do it.