I watched a clip from "Cuties" the other day to see what all the fuss is about. It made me feel like I should be in jail. I am well aware of the director's stated purpose for creating this movie, but I don't believe that any amount of context could possibly justify the existence of the footage I saw. If sexualization of 11-year-old girls is such a big problem (which I don't doubt), then surely the director could have achieved her desired shock and outrage by creating a documentary about the sexualization of 11-year-old girls that already existed, instead of sexualizing 11-year-old girls to prove that sexualizing 11-year-old girls is wrong. When all is said and done, regardless of the intentions behind it, she created something for pedophiles to jack off to and I'm baffled that it was legal. I'm baffled that a cameraperson can zoom in on the rear end of a twerking 11-year-old girl for any reason and not go to jail.

This week the university brought some completely unnecessary extra stress into my life by trying to make me pay $8,300.64 instead of the $595.34 that I actually owed. Somehow they forgot that I've been a Utah resident since 2012 - a fact they should be well aware of since I did my bachelor's degree here under the same ID number I have now, not to mention they never bothered to ask - and charged me $10,787.48 non-resident tuition instead of the $3,082.18 resident tuition that's covered by my graduate instructor tuition award. I lost considerable sleep over this which rendered me mentally incapable of doing almost any homework on Friday, and didn't get so much as an apology for their attempt to swindle me, and the only reason I didn't tell them to get bent is that I don't want to jeopardize my employment. But I still showed them. They didn't say sorry for making the mistake so I didn't say thank you for fixing it.

All this sleep deprivation I've been experiencing since late August for no legitimate reason just feels so gratuitous. It feels like God is saying, "Graduate school is too easy for you, so I'll make up some extra crap to make sure you can't enjoy it."

​On the plus side, my neighbors' dog no longer wakes me up because they seem to have gotten rid of him. He was always out in their fenced backyard, obscured from view, and when I moved in over a year ago he barked every freaking time anyone whatsoever walked past the fence, because apparently he hadn't gotten used to the existence of this apartment complex that's been here at least since the eighties. One night he was barking while I tried to sleep, and I yelled at him a few times to shut up, and he didn't, so I went outside to throw rocks at him. But before I could find any rocks, he shut up. And after that night, instead of barking at passersby he just tried to jump the fence. He still barked at occasional random intervals but if it continued for more than five seconds I yelled at him to shut up and he did. I held no personal ill will against him. I reserved that for his owners, who never lifted a finger to prevent him from being a nuisance to the entire block. Until they recently got rid of him. I don't know why the change, but it may have something to do with this note I left a couple weeks ago.

I wasn't going to sign it "your very tired and pissed off neighbor" but I had extra space and wanted to use it wisely. And I'm glad they believed my bluff about the police. The only reason I would contact the Logan police would be to tell them to go choke on a cactus, but I wasn't sure about the legality of threatening to break the dog's neck.

The girls next door - that is to say, in this apartment complex, on the opposite side from the house where the jerks with the dog live - continue to be loud, but last Sunday they tried to make it up by dropping off zuchinni bread and a card.

Following the example of their predecessors, of course I told the police to tell them to never be nice to me again. (That joke only works if you know what I'm referring to and forgot that I just said the only reason I would contact the Logan police would be to tell them to go choke on a cactus.) Seriously though, I took them up on their offer to party the next day when I had to wait two hours for my laptop to update, but they were busy doing homework and only had time for a game of Uno. I felt very misled. I came over again on Friday because the loud one was screaming so much that I had to make sure she wasn't being murdered. She was just getting too worked up over a game of Sorry. Whatever her quirks, though, at least she probably isn't a delusional pathological liar like one of her predecessors I could mention.

Although I'm done with dating for the foreseeable ever, pandemic or no pandemic, that didn't stop someone in Uganda from trying to play matchmaker.

I appreciate the sentiment, really. There's just a slight cultural difference at play here, like the time he found the profile of some college student in Georgia, decided he was in love with her, and wanted me to add her and set her up with him. I'm not one to assert that my culture is "the right way" to do things, but that just wouldn't have worked. So I just stall and change the subject when these things come up.

Trigger Warning: sex

​The August 2020 issue of the Ensign is one of the last issues of the Ensign that will ever be published, because beginning in January it will be renamed the Liahona, which is the name currently given to the magazine for all Latter-day Saints who don't speak English, though it's not quite equivalent to the current Ensign because it covers material for adults, teenagers, and children while English-speakers have three separate magazines for those categories. Beginning in January all three magazines will be available to everyone, though they will vary from language to language in frequency of publication and amount of content just like the Liahona already does. This change, like rebranding EFY as FSY and cutting ties with the Boy Scouts, removes a systemic difference between the Church in the United States and the Church everyone else. It's an important step toward actually being a global faith and not just trying to act like it.

The cover of this issue says "Talking about Sexuality from a Gospel Perspective" and several of the articles inside do exactly that. Now, I find it really pretentious and annoying in the mainstream society how people go on about their obsession with sex and sexuality and sex life and sexual orientation and sexual health and sexual this and sexual that and sex and sex and sex, pretending that the world revolves around their most primitive animal instinct and trying to make it all sophisticated and intellectual. But I concede that it's got to be talked about sometimes, and there are good ways to do that and bad ways to do that. This issue is obviously striving to promote the good ways to do that and get rid of the cultural stigma, discomfort, and wedding night confusion that plagues our church along with all Christian denominations (and probably other religions) that teach that sex is good within marriage and wicked in any other context. In fairness, sex education at my secular middle school in liberal New York sent mixed messages too. It was all like "Don't have sex, but if you do, use these free condoms."

For a while I've noticed the irony that while I think sex is disgusting beyond all reason, I'm far less squeamish about it than many who ostensibly believe it's beautiful and sacred at the right time. I don't believe that sex is beautiful and/or sacred, because I simply can't, but if you claim that you do, freaking act like it. Don't tell me sex is ordained of God and then treat it like a swear word. So this magazine is a breath of fresh air. It does refer to sex over and over again as "sexual intimacy", using seven syllables where one would do just fine, but that's still accurate and I can live with it. What really irks me is when people just call it "intimacy". As such, this passage from "Conversations about Intimacy and Sex That Can Prepare You for Marriage" was my favorite part of the whole issue:

"​A lot of people use the word intimacy as a synonym for sex, but this can be incomplete and a little confusing. Intimacy refers to feelings of closeness created within emotional, intellectual, and physical areas of relationships. There are a few types of intimacy:

• Emotional intimacy is being open about all your feelings because you feel you have a safe environment.
• Intellectual intimacy is sharing ideas that are important to you or concerns that you are working through with someone who respects your opinions.
• Physical intimacy isn’t necessarily sexual. It can also be demonstrated through simple affection, like a hug, hand holding, or a kiss.
• Healthy sexual intimacy is a sacred union, a mutual giving and receiving of each other’s bodies in an environment of trust and respect to deepen loving marital bonds. The purpose of sexual intimacy is to create children and also to strengthen the emotional, spiritual, and physical connection between spouses."

Saying "intimacy" because you're scared of the word "sex" is a slap in the face to everyone who's ever had a meaningful friendship. Elsewhere, Ty Mansfield has noted, "I’ve even known of men who questioned their sexuality simply because they developed a deep emotional love for another man. It seems our culture often has difficulty distinguishing deep love and intimacy from sexual or erotic desire, and it certainly doesn’t help when in conservative religious cultures we use terms like intimacy - a general human good and need that transcends sexuality - as a euphemism for sex."

On that note, I was happy to see an article by a gay Latter-day Saint on "My Experience Living the Law of Chastity with Same-Sex Attraction". It's the usual "I don't know why God did this to me but I trust Him and I have a really strong testimony" spiel that I would have expected, and I think the article's actual contents are less important than the fact of acknowledging and listening to our LGBTQ+ members in the first place. I'm actually far more interested in the author's Hasidic Jewish background. I think converts from Judaism are even rarer than gay converts, and he's both, and most of Judaism isn't really okay with homosexuality either. Did he know he was gay while he was Jewish? Did anyone else? What was that like? When he converted to the Church of Jesus Christ, which he mentions his Jewish community wasn't thrilled about, did they drop the gay thing and decide this was even worse? How, if at all, does this unique background inform his perspective on both LGBTQ+ and Christian topics?

This issue also contains what I believe is the first ever acknowledgement in any official Church source that asexual people exist. In "Bridling Your Passions: How to Align Sexual Thoughts and Feelings with the Lord's Expectations", we find this gem: "Most of us experience sexual feelings as part of our mortal experience." (emphasis added) Not much, obviously, but it's more than the absolute nothing that I've gotten up to this point. When no other article includes such a caveat, and two or three of them assert that these sexual feelings are a gift from God, I could perhaps be forgiven for wondering if God forgot about me, or deemed me unworthy of the gift, or simply ran out. After all, if the universe has a finite amount of eternally existing matter that God just arranges into planets and people and stuff instead of spawning them ex nihilo, He's got to start cutting corners eventually.

Naturally, there's a lot of focus on how to teach your kids about this stuff, but without going into any real detail. Two or three articles mention the importance of using proper names for body parts. Again, I don't believe these body parts are beautiful or sacred but they are entirely normal and healthy things to have so there's no point in demonizing them. They could have strengthened their point considerably by using those names themselves. It would have sent such a powerful message: "Look, if we can say 'penis' in a church magazine, you can say it to your kids." And I'm sure many readers would benefit from learning, as I did recently, that what they call a vagina is, in fact, a vulva, which consists of at least eleven parts with weird, often Latin names, and the vagina isn't even one of them. The vagina is, in fact, inside of this apparatus. (After reading the magazine, I looked this stuff up on Wikipedia in the hope that familiarizing myself with the not-vagina would help me be less viscerally disgusted by what I think looks like an aborted sarlacc fetus. It didn't work.)

Obviously the Ensign is only meant to be a jumping-off point for these discussions, and is not considered the place for going into a lot of actual detail. I would just like to add my two cents that these discussions should include more than the bare minumum of detail. It's true that my happiness in life has declined in inverse proportion to how much I know about sex, but I'm in the minority, and I don't think anyone particularly enjoys being clueless and taken by surprise on their wedding night. I first learned about sex from a book that described it as when a man inserts his erect penis into his wife's vagina, and pretty much left it at that. So I visualized it as something that took place in the bathroom standing up. (This is anatomically impossible because of how the vagina/vulva is positioned, but I didn't even know that much.) Fortunately the guys at my lunch table at school filled the gaps in my knowledge whether I liked it or not.

Today, in a sort of spiritual successor (no pun intended) to my post "God vs. Human Agency", which I recommend reading first partly as a useful foundation for this post but mostly because it will give me more blog hits, I decided to refute another thing I was told recently, that being "God doesn't tell you who to love" - with "love" there and hereafter meaning the romantic variety of love as opposed to the broader familial love that God has, in fact, told us to bestow on everyone, which I find quite impossible in practice but that's a topic for another occasion. Probably a more common statement with a similar sentiment would be "God doesn't tell you who to marry." It's not a big deal but I just like being argumentative, questioning everything and destroying assumptions that most people take for granted, so here I go doing exactly that. As with the previous one I tackled, why do we make this assumption even though it's not stated authoritatively anywhere?

Most Saints' first response would probably be something like "Because of agency." But God telling you to do something doesn't take away your agency. The whole point of agency is that God tells you to do stuff and you have a choice of whether or not to obey. This scenario would be no different. And I don't know who needs to hear this, but being asked or even required to take certain health precautions to protect everyone around you doesn't take away your agency either, so get over yourself.

But of course, there is also the true principle most famously espoused by President Spencer W. Kimball: "'Soul mates’ are fiction and an illusion; and while every young man and young woman will seek with all diligence and prayerfulness to find a mate with whom life can be most compatible and beautiful, yet it is certain that almost any good man and any good woman can have happiness and a successful marriage if both are willing to pay the price." So God could tell you who to love and/or marry without violating your agency, but it would still violate the principle that you have a world of options open to you and one is just as good as another, absolving you of the important responsibility and growth inherent in making the most important decision of eternity for yourself, yes?

Not necessarily. First of all, even President Kimball's quote hints at some grey area. I don't know how useful it is to dissect every word choice but I think he was careful to avoid making a total blanket statement. He said "almost any good man and any good woman" (emphasis added) can yadda yadda yadda. I came to realize several years ago that if I ended up getting married in mortality, I would ipso facto have to be one of the implied exceptions, because clearly I can't make it work with just anyone and not just anyone can make it work with me. Nobody's shown much interest in trying. I'm quite distinct from normal people in ways both good and not so good, and undoubtedly anyone willing to acquire my acquired taste would be as well, so that I'd have someone interesting to talk to and she wouldn't be the only one tolerating someone's issues. Yes, we're "all unique and special" and "all have baggage" but if we're being honest we all know that a few people are more unique and have more baggage than others. Michael Jackson said it best at the beginning of the "Thriller" video.

MJ: I'm not like other guys.
Woman: Of course not! That's why I love you!
​MJ: No, I mean I'm different.

My mother, a big Michael Jackson fan, got annoyed at me when she showed us kids the video and I laughed at that part. Needless to say he was famous for different reasons when I was in school than when she was in school. But I digress.

For another thing, not to put too fine a point on it, but many Latter-day Saint women - and I'm not saying they're worse than men, but I'm not talking about men in this context - have taught me a lot about what I don't want in a marriage partner. I have criteria too and if nobody who meets them is willing to love me, I'd rather stay alone than sacrifice them. For example, I don't expect her political views to be identical to mine, especially as mine are still in flux, but if she's dogmatic and hypocritical and stupid about one side or the other like most Americans then it's a "Bye Felicia" from me. I also worry sometimes about the quantity of middle-aged Latter-day Saint women (and again, men, but again, irrelevant) on social media who seem to be a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Is that normal? When my hypothetical wife turns forty, is she going to lose her proficiency in English grammar and her ability to differentiate between emotionally manipulative urban legends and real life? If so, I don't think I can stay hypothetically married. Not long ago a woman old enough to be my mother told me "Your arrogance is not attractive" and I wanted to say "Neither is your stupidity" but I didn't because I'm a good Christian sometimes.

In 2013 I got a priesthood blessing for something I don't even remember now, probably insomnia, and the guy felt prompted to go off on a tangent that I hadn't asked about or even been thinking about. He said the Lord wanted me to know that I would find a girl after my mission. It was really weird and I dismissed it as an anomaly because, as I used to assume but recently spent a blog post debunking, God can't promise anything that involves another person's agency. Then it happened again with someone else, and then it happened again with someone else. Then I was preparing for my mission, and I had to meet with LDS Family Services and talk to this therapist who, apropos nothing, mused about how terrible it is to not know whether you'll be alone for the rest of your life. He didn't offer a solution, he just mused about how terrible it is. I told him God had actually promised me that I would find someone. He said I was very fortunate. But then I didn't go on a mission after all and figured even if the promise was legit, I had blown it. Oh well.

I knew those blessings couldn't all be dismissed so easily but that didn't stop me. Agency is a thing and I'm not attractive, so God is wrong, end of discussion, let's move on. There was also the small matter of my ambivalence toward marriage in the first place. I'm not like most people who feel a need for companionship and go out searching for someone to fill that need. Rather, I enjoy my solitary lifestyle and feel no desire to alter it except when I happen to stumble upon someone whose company I enjoy more than the freedom to do what I want when I want. And there are several people in this world who want to get married and deserve to get married but won't. So why, I wondered, didn't God make this promise to one of them instead? He or she would appreciate it a lot more. I don't need it. I can cope with being alone for the rest of my life better than most probably can.

In 2017 I fell really hard for a coworker who set the bar for all prospective spouses going forward. Before her, I had decided who I liked on a case-by-case basis; after her, I knew exactly what I wanted and couldn't be satisfied with anything less. But she had a boyfriend on a mission and was already planning on marrying him when he came home. I calculated that if I had gone on a mission myself and then started working there when I came home, I would have met her a year earlier, before she decided to wait for him, and maybe I would have married her instead. Maybe, I realized, she was meant to be the one for me, but I used my agency to screw it up. Last year, nearly six years after the first anomalous blessing, I got another one that actually was love-related this time, and the guy promised that my alleged wife and I will both know that it's right. Not necessarily in a "love at first sight" way, though, as he also said something about "whether you've already met her or not." I appreciate God's helpfulness in narrowing it down to those two options.

By this point of course it was obvious that God had someone specific in mind, and that none of the women I had considered over the years was her. One could, in an attempt to preserve agency, split hairs and insist that this obvious meaning isn't the actual meaning, that the future event of a marriage is set in stone but the other party involved is subject to change. But to my mind that's a logical impossibility. Either both aspects are set in stone or both are subject to change. It's not like God is saying, "You're such a nice guy, I'm sure you'll find someone or other, and I'm so confident in that probability that I'm willing to risk a universe-destroying paradox by potentially making a liar out of myself after I state it as a fact."

This past January, a fifth guy gave me a blessing because I was nervous about an emergency dental appointment with no insurance, and he went off for like ten minutes with all these completely unrelated glorious promises and encouragement, which I would have chalked up to him being insane if he hadn't told me to keep writing even though I'd said like two words to him before that night and "I'm a writer" wasn't one of them. He told me that soon (whatever "soon" means to Mr. "a thousand years is one day") I would hold hands in the temple with a daughter of God. He said she's broken like me but we'll be together we'll be a powerful force for awesomeness and stuff. And maybe a normal person would have gotten excited but honestly, this was a mere couple weeks after my already pathetic love life had exploded in spectacular fashion beyond my most paranoid imaginings, and my first thought was Are you -----ing me? I have to fall in love again? And then he said some words that seemed to be God's direct refutation of my worry that I'd already blown it, but were also quite jarring in light of the Church's teaching that predestination is not a thing. He said, "Nothing can stop it from happening."
​
Well, all right then. Agency shmagency. I acknowledged once and for all that God's promise was legit even though it made no sense.

For a week or so, starting with the receptionist and the hygienist at the dentist's office, I couldn't help looking at every potentially available woman and thinking, Is it her? It could be anyone. How on Earth will I know? It made me not like myself and I got tired of it quickly and stopped thinking like that. If nothing can stop it, then my lack of specific action can't stop it, so there's nothing to stress about. But - and not for the first time - I grew just a bit resentful toward God too. So He's just bouncing me around like a pinball from learning experience to learning experience, shunting me toward the predetermined destination that is the woman He already chose for me? Do I get any say in any of this at some point?

So I've tried to figure out how this makes any sense and I think I've found a much more satisfactory answer than I did to my last existential query. In response to the question "I know we don't believe in predestination but does Heavenly Father already have someone picked out for us to marry?" the website Ask Gramps expressed a viewpoint that makes perfect sense to me: "​Were we foreordained to be someone’s child? Someone’s spouse? Someone’s parent? That is a question that can only be answered between you and God. I tend to think that it is a very real possibility for a lot of people (but maybe not all). That being said, we need to be careful that we do not take this possibility and twist it into a form of predestination. With all foreordinations, the people here and now have to make that choice to bring it to pass.... But please note that 'Soul Mate' is not the same as 'Foreordained Spouse' (assuming that is how it was set up and yes I just made that term up) even though there can be quite a bit of overlap. The first robs agency. The second is subject to agency."

This distinction is important in light of the fact that some people in and out of the Church have recognized "the one" immediately. Examples that I'm personally aware of:

Mr. Dubray, not a member of the Church, saw someone for the first time, said to himself "I'm going to marry that girl" and did. At the time I attended his wife's dance school they had probably been married at least thirty years.

Brother and Sister Myler from my childhood branch both knew on their first date that they were going to marry each other, which made it really awkward.

Wain Myers, author of From Baptist Preacher to Mormon Teacher, wrote the following on his now-defunct website: "I was about thirteen years old and one night I had a dream about this girl. Now I know what you’re thinking; what thirteen year old boy doesn’t dreams about girls. But this was a different dream, the feelings I had in this dream where so strong and so profound, that I woke up with one mission; to find this girl. I couldn’t see her face in the dream; I saw only the back of her as she walked in front of me to school. But the feeling I got from her was so gravitational, that I looked for her for years after that dream. Actually, I never stopped looking for her, but I only had the image of what she looked like from the back. It never dawned on me that instead of looking for her that I should be feeling, for her until that very moment.

"I was mesmerized and not only could I not take my eyes off her; I didn’t want to take my eyes off her. As I looked at her, I heard the voice of my Father say 'that’s your wife' in a sweet gentle voice. I said to my Father 'how is this?' He said 'the wife you chose is not who I chose for you, this is the woman I chose for you!' The feeling was the same as the feeling I had in my dream and I knew my Father was right. I said to my Father 'well, if she is my wife, I think you need to tell her because she does not look like she wants to hear it from me!'"

Rod, in the comments of the aforementioned Ask Gramps post: "In my experience we have promised partners. The gal I'm sealed to knew instantly I was who she came to earth to marry. The missionary who baptised me knew she was my Eternal companion as soon as he met her. I'm a little slow. It wasn't untill after she passed that I received a confirmation. Simply ask, would you come to earth to marry a stranger? I don't think so."

Elizabeth Gibson, also in the comments: "I never know what to say about any of this. I am a convert and was never raised to believe in soul-mates or that the Lord would put two people together. I'm not really sure what a soulmate means. However, I have had two great spiritual experiences in my life, the first one was how the Lord led me to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the second was how he led me to the husband after telling me very specific things about him in order to recognize him when I found him. At the time that all of this happened, I did not know that the apostles and some prophets had spoken out against the idea that the Lord had specific people for us to marry. I had never heard of pro or con about it. However, over the years since I have married my husband, I have had a bishop who was told that he had promised in the pre life to marry a certain woman. I've had a friend whose father was told prior to meeting his current wife that he was to look for someone specific to the Lord's Direction. I have known a handful of people who had similar experiences to mine. I don't know why the Brethren teach that you can marry any fine person and it doesn't really matter as long as they are faithful. If you Google it, you find all kinds of quotes that what happened to me cannot possibly happen. But it did happen and it's one of the biggest spiritual experiences I ever had. To deny that would be to deny my testimony or how I found the church."

Even no less an authority than the late President Thomas S. Monson said, "The first day I saw Frances, I knew I’d found the right one. The Lord brought us together later, and I asked her to go out with me."

Oh, and what about Adam and Eve? What are they if not definitive scriptural proof that the concept of foreordained spouses was true for at least two people? Even taking into account the obvious reality that they were not literally the first and only homo sapiens on the entire planet at that time as traditionally portrayed, it's pretty obvious that they were meant to be together. I sort of winked at the possibility in my irreverent little satire of creationism, but for real though, imagine the awkwardness if Adam had said, "Eh, thanks, God, but I don't think she's my type."

This sort of thing may be more the exception than the rule. Certainly if everyone had a foreordained spouse, it would only take one wrong marriage to set off a chain reaction that ruined the system for millions of people. But this phenomenon is clearly a real thing. And explaining it via the premortal existence preserves both agency and the importance of making the most important decisions for oneself. I am convinced that the reason God has someone specific in mind for me is that she and I already chose each other a long time ago, and He is simply honoring that decision. I am convinced that as long as He directs our lives to ensure that our paths cross at the appropriate time, He knows that we'll both know that it's right and will use our agency to be together, because somewhere beneath the veil of forgetfulness our hearts will both recognize that we already fell in love a long time ago. To me that's the only way this promise and this apparent divine usurpation of our decision-making authority makes any sense.

Please don't mistake any of this for the unfortunate incidents at weird places like BYU when someone, usually but not always male, tells the unfortunate object of their affections "God told me that I'm supposed to marry you" or "I dreamed that I'm supposed to marry you" or whatever and just expects them to accept that. In cases like the ones mentioned above, obviously both spouses still needed to make their own decision. In my case, with the way the Spirit speaks to me, I don't actually expect to ever have an abrupt revelation on the matter like one of those, and even if I do, I probably won't dare to believe it unless God opens a literal conduit of light above her head and plays "Unmistakeable" by the Backstreet Boys. If I find someone that I think is maybe probably my foreordained spouse, either we'll get married and prove me correct or we won't and prove me wrong and that's all there is to it. The right situation will fall into place without coercion and the wrong one can't be forced into place by any power on Earth or heaven.

Now I don't know if anyone is still reading but I'm not quite ready to shut up yet because the actual statement that sparked all this was not "God doesn't tell you who to marry" but "God doesn't tell you who to love." And in the short term those aren't necessarily the same thing. Most people have to fall in love a few times before it works out, which can be essential to developing important attributes like patience, humility, selflessness, and post-traumatic stress disorder. I don't know how many times I've been in love because really, what is love? Yeah. No, I don't know why you're not there. I give you my love but you don't care. So what is right and what is wrong? Give me a sign. What is love? And where's the line between like and love? For the purposes of discussion I'll pretend like it's always love because feelings are subjective anyway and you can't prove me wrong.

In May of last year some General Authority or other hosted a YSA devotional about the importance of dating and marriage. Nothing I hadn't heard and rolled my eyes at before. At that time I was not dating, trying to date or looking into the possibility of trying to date, but for whatever reason I decided to obey the counsel of my church leaders, take a leap of faith and make a little bit more than zero effort. All I could bring myself to do for a start was talk to a coworker I thought was hot. I talked to her during break, and she was nice and stuff but I immediately thought, "Wow, she's so young, we have nothing in common." It only cost me ten minutes that I could have been listening to music, so I didn't regret it, and for all I know I changed her life forever when I asked what she wanted to do and she said she didn't know and I asked what she was passionate about and she said she didn't know and I said she should find out and do it. Then that evening I talked to another woman from my ward. I should have paced myself.

By taking these steps of obedience, I think I opened myself up to divine guidance that I never asked for. A couple days later, I noticed another coworker who was in my stake and had been on a different shift during the school year. I didn't know why I noticed her when I thought she was utterly plain-looking. She came to my station to do quality control and here's one of those many times when I only recognize the Spirit's voice in hindsight. The Spirit said, Talk to her. And I thought that was myself thinking and I just thought back to myself in response, Meh, I don't really feel like it. The Spirit said a little more insistently, Talk to her. So I said something like "Hey, you're in my stake" and she said something like "Oh, cool" and the conversation would have fizzled out right then. The Spirit said, Ask her name. I didn't care what her name was, but I asked and she told me. I thought, What an unattractive name.

To make a long story short, she soon became a lot less plain-looking and I fell pretty hard. Almost from day one it stressed me out and cost me hours of sleep every night, and it turned out to be completely not worth it. She was not at all the kind of person I built her up in my mind to be. She was such a waste of my time and so unworthy of the emotion I invested in her that I couldn't even chalk this up to a learning experience, because, you know, every bad thing that happens to you is supposed to be a "learning experience". And I got about as angry at God as I've ever been because this was, of course, all His fault. He pushed me into this situation that I never asked for and then sat back to watch me struggle and fail no matter how hard I begged Him for help. If He had just left me alone, I would have avoided a lot of unnecessary and pointless suffering. So in a sense, God did tell me who to love.

I stand by my initial assessment that this was not a learning experience in any meaningful sense, and I think that phrase is kind of a bullcrap copout as often as not, but I think maybe I can kind of see the reason for it now.

At Summerfest I ran into this guy from her ward that I knew a little, and ended up hanging out with him and at least a dozen other people until like one in the morning. So most of them knew her and for whatever reason, the topic of conversation kept coming back to her and what did I like about her and when was I going to ask her out and so on. I bonded with these people over her, added them all on Facebook in large part to boost my credibility in case I ever got around to adding her on Facebook, and continued texting and hanging out with some of them throughout the summer. One of them was my friend Terrah. When I was forced to move for the third time that year and didn't have a new place lined up this time, and of course procrastinated until most places were full because apartment hunting is less fun than choking on a fork, I turned to Terrah for help. Despite being six years younger than me she was/is a far more functional adult and graciously agreed to call place after place after place on my behalf while I sat next to her being useless. For this act of service I felt as though I should fall to my knees and wet her feet with my tears of gratitude.

Then she called the company that owned the place where she was staying, and they said that a few guys in a few places were selling their contracts, and as I previously mentioned, when they listed the place where my friend Steve lived I was more than happy to take it. Also as previously mentioned, this exciting fresh start turned into a nightmare and I don't yet understand its purpose, but still it's obvious to me that this is another example of God weaving disparate threads together to direct my life whether I like it or not. If I hadn't wasted my time on that girl I wouldn't have gotten to know Terrah much if at all, and she wouldn't have gotten me here. I still think God in His infinite wisdom could have found an easier way but whatever.

This is God bouncing me around like a pinball. And maybe it doesn't matter in every instance who I bounce off of or in what order, so long as it hurts sufficiently. Maybe in some instances God doesn't care who I set my affections on and, if I bothered to ask for His input (which I typically haven't), would say "Grow up and make your own decisions." But with hindsight I'm positive He hand-picked the most significant ones for specific reasons whether I asked for them or not. Again, the paradox is that He seems to have directed virtually every moment of my life despite my ostensible freedom to make my own decisions, and I haven't developed a better explanation for it since that post, but what I'm getting at is that in any given scenario where I feel drawn to love someone, I won't likely have any clue going into it whether she is or isn't "the one" (and obviously the results have been 0/100% on that thus far), but I may discern with a high degree of confidence that God wants me to love her and that if I do, I'll be blessed by the experience even though I'll probably hate most of it.

Anyway, when His promise is kept, the entire world or at least everyone who's ever met me will have no choice but to fall to their knees and confess that there is a God.

I feel bad because I don't know how long it was there and I only noticed it when I stepped on it with bare feet, but somebody left a yellow flower at my door a few days ago. Such a vague little gesture that I can't even guess at its meaning, and yet it must have one because its placement was clearly premeditated because my door is separated from the sidewalk by at least two meters and a fence. Nobody could have dropped the flower there by accident. They could have flung it, perhaps, if they were walking by with it and something startled them, but that seems contrived. Only like five people still in Logan are supposed to know where I live, and I can rule out three of them, leaving one or both of my next-door neighbors who hate me as the most plausible candidates. Maybe I have a stalker, but I couldn't begin to guess who that would be when there isn't currently a single woman at work or church that I've ever had a conversation with. If someone is stalking me based on my looks alone she's in for quite a disappointment.

Of course, I'm not assuming any romantic intent behind it since I don't know what intent was behind it but that would still be weird if a guy did it so I'm assuming a guy didn't do it. I looked up the symbolism of yellow flowers specifically: joy, sunshine, friendship, new beginnings. But was that level of thought put into the color scheme, or does all the intended symbolism rest in the plant genitals themselves regardless of detail? Anyway, I put the flower in a bottle of water and left it outside but it died quickly. I laid it to rest on the concrete lip around my doorway. It disappeared. Either an animal that eats dead yellow flowers but not grass wandered through, or whoever gave it to me took it back. I've kept a casual eye out for that type of flower growing anywhere around here with no success so far. It was either purchased somewhere or plucked a considerable distance away. Since I didn't have the foresight to get a picture of it, you'll have to take a leap of faith and trust me.

A few days later, someone left me cookies, and I reached a logical conclusion and got all excited that my stalker was stepping up her game. But then one of the five people still in Logan who are supposed to know where I live admitted to leaving them just as a random nice gesture. How was I supposed to know? Who does that? So the mystery of the flower remains. Dear flower giver, if you read this, I was just kidding when I called you a stalker. Don't be hurt by my lack of reaction or response, as there was really nothing I could do when I have no idea who you are or what the little yellow flower was supposed to mean. Please feel free to keep leaving stuff or doing whatever else you have in mind, unless you're a guy. It's fine if you just want to be friends but it would still be weird if you're a guy.

An even more surprising but more easily explained surprise came in the form of an email from Debbie, whom long-time readers of this blog will remember from a long time ago. I've been thinking about her periodically since she is in large measure responsible for the direction my life has taken and it just makes me wax philosophical about how events build on each other and how God brings things about and so on. During the summer of '16 she often texted me in the evenings to say I could come over, so I dropped everything and rushed over and we sat on the balcony outside her apartment and talked. Then her neighbor Steve usually came home from work while we were talking and she invited him to join us. I kept my feet propped up on the third chair hoping he would take a hint, but he wouldn't. As things turned out I remained friends with Steve long after Debbie and I parted ways, and he stayed in the same apartment complex, and last year when I found out someone was selling his contract here I jumped at the chance to be his neighbor, changing wards for the first time in seven years and embarking on a fresh start that so far has been an epic disaster. But I know God wanted me here for some reason.

Anyway, the email was full of feedback that I had long ago accepted I would never receive for the book manuscript I sent her fifty-six months ago, back when I used to send it out to people who said they would read it and then didn't. I hadn't actually asked for any feedback but she gave me some for the first chapter and it was so brilliant that I knew I needed her to critique the whole thing before I dared try to publish it. And then she just got busy and stopped. And then almost a year later when she broke my heart she tried to cheer me up by telling me she'd started reading it again, and that was the last I heard of it until just the other day. My first reaction to the email was "Holy crap" and my second reaction was embarrassment that she read such an old draft. I've learned a lot and done plenty of revising since then and compared to my current draft, the one she has in her possession is garbage. I'm not even sure how much of the feedback is still applicable. Do you see, Debbie? I moved on. I got stronger. I don't need you anymore. In all seriousness though, it was great to hear from her.

Fifty-six months. I had to check the math again because I couldn't believe it.

This is a nostalgic time of year already, even more so than usual for me, because today I've been in Utah for nine years. Nine years is almost ten years which is a sacred number to humans. Usually 7-Eleven celebrates the anniversary of my arrival by giving out free Slurpees but it's canceled this year because I've written one too many controversial things. As ridiculous as this will sound coming from one who just turned twenty-seven, the passage of almost a decade makes me feel very old. Because in human terms, not getting into the geological timescale where our existence as a species represents only a couple minutes, a decade is a freaking long time. For the overwhelming majority of us it's more than a tenth of the time we have on this planet. Often much more. In my case, I've felt for a long time like I'm going to die in my early forties, and that may just be wishful thinking on my part but I do know I haven't got a chance in hell of making it to ninety unless medical science advances sufficiently to replace every organ in my body. Which it probably will, but I won't be able to afford it because I live in a country that thinks healthcare is a privilege.

Barely out of high school, I embarked on the nightmare, I mean adventure that is adult life. I wasn't nearly as afraid as I ought to have been. As year after year has gone by I've experienced more pain than I could have imagined, much of it caused by my own mistakes that I still get to suffer from long after I've learned from them. I've grown into a different person and all that jazz. If I could go back and speak to that naive little boy, I would offer the following advice:

- Don't procrastinate.

- Don't stay up until two in the morning just because you can.

- Don't seek unhealthy coping mechanisms when you feel isolated.

- Don't isolate yourself by withdrawing from the people who actually care about you.

- Pay attention to your bank balance and email inbox.

- Don't be so dogmatic and inflexible about politics.

- Don't fall in love.

- Always pay rent on time.

- Talk to your academic advisor regularly.

- Avail yourself of the counseling services on campus that you already paid for.

- Don't be afraid to talk to the registrar's office, professors etc. when you screw up and need help. That's their job. They're not going to yell at you.

- Don't be afraid to stand up for what you believe in.

- Don't be so dogmatic and inflexible about religion.

- Seriously, don't fall in love.

- Participate in as many clubs and activities as you can before, I don't know, a global pandemic cancels all of them. Hypothetically.

- Communicate with people who are pissing you off instead of harboring silent resentment.

​- Don't work at a call center in a misguided attempt to boost your confidence.

- Don't eat too much candy.

- White privilege is real, and racism in the United States is much worse than you think it is.

- Be patient with yourself even when it seems like nobody else is.

- I'm not kidding. No matter how hard it is, don't fall in love.

Wow. I can't believe I just wrote something like that without being sarcastic. But the real treasure was the friends I made along the way. And lost. I've lost a lot of them, too. Most of the Facebook friends I met in the dorms my freshman year have unfriended me by now. But the random girl who politely declined to be kissed by me at True Aggie Night has stuck with me for all these years, and that counts for something. The girl I actually did kiss unfriended me after a few years though.

Nine years from today, I hope to be typing away at my latest upcoming bestseller, watching my dogs play in the surf beneath the glorious sunset over Bora Bora, Tahiti, a smile on my face as I think of all the money in my bank account. My wife Felicity Jones is half a world away making another Star Wars anthology spinoff prequel Disney+ exclusive series, but that's okay because one of the few things I love more than her is Star Wars. Though admittedly it's been a little less interesting ever since we made contact with actual aliens and learned the secrets of interstellar travel. At first they tried to annihilate us, but it was just a relief to finally face enemies we could actually see instead of another global pandemic, and then they apologized and we let it go because we were screwed if we kept fighting anyway. Felicity's and my adopted alien children have all grown up (they have a short life cycle) and dispersed to three far-flung solar systems which we rotate between for Easter, Christmas and St. Zarquon's Day. Most of Earth's tourism is now siphoned off to the improbable single-biome tropical planets, which is how I got this prime piece of real estate in Tahiti for so cheap, even though I could have paid a lot more because I'm loaded.

The word "therapist" caught my attention because I once attended a Sunday school lesson taught by a therapist and it was about depression and stuff and it was great. Based on that one experience I assumed this one would also talk about something more interesting and worthwhile than the advertised topic would seem to indicate.

I barely knew Sister Dymock but I was familiar with her husband, the stake president. Before President Dymock was a stake president, he was a mission president in Washington, and before that he was director of the Logan Institute of Religion. And I'm old enough to have known him back then. I first became acquainted with him when I emailed him to complain about my institute teachers bashing on evolution. I took two institute classes per semester back then, and something seemed to come up in every one, ranging from an offhand derisive comment that "We didn't evolve from slime off a rock" to a solid ten minutes of embarrassing pseudoscientific attempts to refute the theory. He told me I was correct that the Church had no position in evolution, that he had already told the teachers in a meeting over the summer not to say stuff like that, and that if I told him the offenders' names he would discreetly remind them and not mention me. And I thought that was pretty swell of him.

But after it happened a few more times - this occasion being the final straw - I decided that despite President Dymock's best intentions, we were clearly dealing with a systemic problem too large for him to handle on his own. So I called church headquarters in Salt Lake and tried to reach Elder Paul V. Johnson of the Seventy, Commissioner of Church Education (who recently made the news for the infamous "clarification" of BYU's Honor Code changes that he inexplicably sent two weeks after the fact). I left a message with his secretary and then the next time I called she said he had suggested I talk to this other guy whose name I forget, but he was in charge of seminaries and institutes for the world and I didn't understand the difference between that and Elder Johnson's position but now I realize that of course Church Education encompasses a bit more than seminaries and institutes.

This guy listened patiently to my story, taking notes, asking questions for clarification. He asked how I would handle the topic of evolution in church settings, praised me for being so polite and deferential, and asked if I had served a mission. This experience of being so listened to and validated by an adult (which I technically also was, but at age twenty, I felt like it even less than I do now) has been replicated few other times in my life, mostly by therapists and Bishop Paul Fjeldsted, who incidentally during this time was receiving my updates on my crusade against creationism with obvious support and amusement.

A few semesters later I was in President Dymock's own Mission Prep class. We got to the "Preach My Gospel" section on the Creation, and he pointed out how deliberately brief and vague it is. Then he said this: "You know the reason for conflicts between science and religion? Bad religion."

I think that's a slight oversimplification, but even so, I looked at him like

The next time one of those incidents occurred, I walked out of the class in question and never went back.

​Anyway, his wife began her remarks by advising us to ask God to help us get what we needed out of them. Beside me, my friend said, "Help me to not hate men." I thought that was a bit harsh. I don't hate women. I just sort of see them as being like Klingons. Almost exclusively evil, but not quite, and I'm not going to discriminate and be like "No, Worf, you can't join my crew because you're a Klingon."

True to my expectations, Sister Dymock spent most of her devotional not talking about dating per se much at all. She talked instead about mental health. Of course the connection is obvious - if you're not mentally healthy enough, nobody on God's green Earth will want to date you - but it has so many other applications and is just a better topic in general and it should have been the title of the devotional but nobody asked me. She said it's important to be "well-differentiated" and I don't remember what that means but it's important. For maybe the last twenty minutes or so she did talk about dating specifically, and she called up her husband to stand with her and she talked about how they met and fell in love and stuff. This is always iffy territory because unless your love story is really freaking interesting, I'm happy for your happily ever after but I really couldn't care less how it happened.

The story itself was nothing special, but one line justified the entire price of admission. Brother Dymock said something to the effect of, "I would later find out that she was well-differentiated. But at the time, I just thought she was well-defined."

Cue riotous, shocked laughter that he dared to say such a thing in a church setting. My respect for him increased tenfold. It reminded me of a Sunday school class in my home branch several years ago. The branch president was sitting in and I don't think it had any relevance to the lesson but the teacher decided to ask him what first drew him to his wife. He thought about it seriously for a few seconds and then said with great confidence, "She was hot!" I'm sure that's not the kind of response the teacher was going for, but honesty is important.

Sister Dymock mentioned, as many others have, that according to no less an authority than Dallin H. Oaks' granddaughter, a date can be defined as "planned, paired off, and paid for". You know it's true because alliteration. As it happens, I had a date the very next day after this devotional. It had been planned well in advance and postponed a couple times. I paired off with a student at the Weber State University Department of Dental Hygiene to clean my teeth. Then I paid for it. See, this is a joke because what I just described perfectly fits the given definition but is nonetheless not what most people would consider a "date". In all complete seriousness, though, it was one of the best dates I've ever been on. She was very, very cute and nice and enjoyable to talk to. Real shame about her marital status but the definition doesn't say anything about that.

People like to quote that bit from then-Elder Oaks' 2006 devotional, and sometimes they quote other bits too, but nobody except me ever quotes the very best bit and I have no idea why. This was a game-changer for me. Quote:

"Now, brothers and sisters, if you are troubled about something we have just said, please listen very carefully to what I will say now. Perhaps you are a young man feeling pressured by what I have said about the need to start a pattern of dating that can lead to marriage, or you are a young woman troubled by what we have said about needing to get on with your life.

"If you feel you are a special case, so that the strong counsel I have given doesn’t apply to you, please don’t write me a letter. Why would I make this request? I have learned that the kind of direct counsel I have given results in a large number of letters from members who feel they are an exception, and they want me to confirm that the things I have said just don’t apply to them in their special circumstance.

"I will explain why I can’t offer much comfort in response to that kind of letter by telling you an experience I had with another person who was troubled by a general rule. I gave a talk in which I mentioned the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' (Ex. 20:13). Afterward a man came up to me in tears saying that what I had said showed there was no hope for him. 'What do you mean?' I asked him.

"He explained that he had been a machine gunner during the Korean War. During a frontal assault, his machine gun mowed down scores of enemy infantry. Their bodies were piled so high in front of his gun that he and his men had to push them away in order to maintain their field of fire. He had killed a hundred, he said, and now he must be going to hell because I had spoken of the Lord’s commandment 'Thou shalt not kill.'

"The explanation I gave that man is the same explanation I give to you if you feel you are an exception to what I have said. As a General Authority, I have the responsibility to preach general principles. When I do, I don’t try to define all the exceptions. There are exceptions to some rules. For example, we believe the commandment is not violated by killing pursuant to a lawful order in an armed conflict. But don’t ask me to give an opinion on your exception. I only teach the general rules. Whether an exception applies to you is your responsibility. You must work that out individually between you and the Lord.

"The Prophet Joseph Smith taught this same thing in another way. When he was asked how he governed such a diverse group of Saints, he said, 'I teach them correct principles, and they govern themselves.' In what I have just said, I am simply teaching correct principles and inviting each one of you to act upon these principles by governing yourself."

Close quote and proverbial mic drop.

Sister Dymock mentioned and tried to address a few questions and concerns that people have about dating. One of them was violence and rape. I have never heard anyone in a church setting be candid and honest enough to acknowledge that this concern exists. Alas, she didn't really address it, but how could she? Telling people (mostly but not exclusively men) not to be violent or rape is kind of pointless because everyone freaking knows that already and either cares or doesn't, and telling people (mostly but not exclusively women) how to protect themselves is victim-blaming. It's a lose-lose. 

Another question people have, according to her, is how can you politely tell someone you're not interested?

"Call the police on him," I deadpanned.
​
Beside me, my friend laughed.

Sister Dymock didn't have any solid easy answer to that one either but she suggested as a general principle that you should try to leave the person better than you found them.

"Yeah, Calise," I deadpanned.

Beside me, my friend doubled over and spasmed as she fought to restrain her laughter. Beside her, her other friend started laughing too, though the look on her face suggested that she wasn't sure why. And this continued for so long that I started to think they must both be laughing at something else altogether until my friend gasped, "'Yeah, Calise!' I'm dying!"

Toward the end, Sister Dymock threw in a shoutout to LGBT people and their unique challenges in the church, which was nice, though I doubt many bothered to show up in the first place.

The devotional was only tainted by trace amounts of the banal sort of advice one gets everywhere else. President Dymock drew on his mission president expertise and suggested that the "Preach My Gospel" manual has great guidelines for dating as well as missionary work: "Talk to everyone, get referrals..." Cue everyone else laughing and me rolling my eyes because it wasn't that funny and I'm an introvert, thank you very much. Okay, he's not perfect but I still love him.

Another piece of advice that stuck with me, which seems as good as any to end my post on, was Sister Dymock's suggestion that after we've been severely hurt we can pray for the courage to try again. I'm sure this is great advice for some people and some scenarios. But I'll be damned if I'm going to take it. That would be like asking God to help me stab myself thirty-seven times in the chest. Or worse. Actual footage of me after the last time I fell in love:

Hmmm, let me think, do I ever, ever, ever under any conceivable circumstances want to open myself up to the possibility of experiencing anything like that ever again?

Anyway, what I got out of this devotional is that I need to just focus on myself and my own improvement and relationship with God. That's really very liberating. Now I'll have no one to blame for my constant failures and setbacks but myself.