EndowmentBrigham Young said, "Your endowment is, to receive all those ordinances in the house of the Lord, which are necessary for you, after you have departed this life, to enable you to walk back to the presence of the Father, passing the angels who stand as sentinels, being enabled to give them the key words, the signs and tokens, pertaining to the holy Priesthood, and gain your eternal exaltation in spite of earth and hell." I wrote a bit more about it already on this page, but not a lot more and nothing that I shouldn't have. There are aspects of the ceremony that are not to be shared with anyone outside the temple and I respect that and nobody better freak out about this post. I'll do my best not to be too opaque, but without getting ridiculously long this beginning portion will probably make little sense to people not of my religion and I'm sorry about that. Suffice to say that this is an important ceremony considered essential to get into the highest level of heaven. Any qualified adult member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can get endowed, but it's typically done before serving a mission or getting married. Since I didn't serve a mission, I was never going to do it unless I just went and did it without a special occasion in mind. At any given time after the age change in 2012 it seemed that virtually everyone in my ward was endowed and considered this ceremony synonymous with the temple. When people ask "Have you been to the temple?" they're asking if you've been endowed, not whether you do baptisms for the dead at the temple every week. I resented that more than a little bit. I felt like nobody cared about or indeed even remembered the sacred ordinance that I performed despite it being equally necessary and a prerequisite to endowments, and I felt like I was spiritually behind everyone else and it hurt. Did I overreact? Probably. Were my ward members and priesthood leaders a tad insensitive? Also probably. I did do baptisms for the dead every week for a period, though, and there in the baptistry I felt appreciated. Technically I should have called ahead to make appointments, but the workers considered me to have a standing appointment and were always thrilled to see me. I made a decision to never turn around and leave when I saw how busy it was, and sometimes I had to wait upwards of an hour for massive groups of teenagers to go through, but it was worth it to leave feeling lightened like a coat that had gone through the wash and had all the dirt filtered out. I had at least one, maybe two experiences with the deceased people I was doing work for. So basically it was great. As time went on, though, I felt more awkward being in there with so many younger people. Most people who've gotten their own endowments don't do the baptisms that often. I stopped showing up and let my temple recommend expire for a couple years. But I was in no hurry to progress. Despite knowing intellectually that I needed to do this at some point if I was serious about my faith, in practice I wasn't planning on it at all. I didn't want to wear temple garments almost 24/7 for the rest of my life, as endowed Latter-day Saints do to remember the covenants they made and receive spiritual protection, and I was afraid the ceremony would be freakishly weird and give me nightmares. Over the years, by accident, I probably heard and read a bit more about its various incarnations past and present than I was supposed to - more often than not from less than friendly perspectives - and I didn't like all of the things I heard and read. I knew that the vast majority of people who had the experience loved it, but some very much did not, and my trajectory seemed predestined for the latter group. So I addressed it like I do most of my problems: by trying to ignore it. I still wouldn't have taken this step if not for the influence of the new senior missionary couple who got all excited when they learned that I hadn't. Long story short, they went through all the Temple Prep lessons with me and gave me stuff to read and I felt the Spirit making me comfortable with the idea. Mostly. I still occasionally worried. I had a few nightmares leading up to it. But then, I've had a lot of nightmares the last few months about all kinds of things. I don't know why. My crappy life hasn't been noticeably crappier than usual. The only one I enjoyed was the one where I was in a literal Jurassic Park movie getting chased by a T. rex. In that dream I experienced all the heart-rending terror of being moments away from those massive jaws and wet, putrid breath, and was forced to think for the first time about how those characters must have felt in the moments before they died, and how much it hurt before they lost consciousness. But even in the midst of feeling that, I recognized that it was totally awesome because I was being chased by a freaking T. rex. I'm not even joking when I call that a good nightmare. Anyway, I had to do the usual worthiness interviews and I gained an appreciation for this concept of worthiness and perfection not being the same thing. I'm grateful, for instance, that the questions didn't include things like "Do you ever swear when the wi-fi stops working every day?" or "Do you still harbor hatred toward, to list a totally random hypothetical example, a parasite who owes you more than six thousand dollars but has paid back literally thirty cents in the last eight months?" I would not be temple worthy in this life time if I were required to rectify all of my massive personal defects. But I think I'm an okay person. The senior missionaries said the stake president told them he felt good about me going to the temple. That was good to hear. It would have been awkward if he'd said something like "I felt sick to my stomach the whole time, but I couldn't deny his recommend because he answered all the questions right." I got endowed Tuesday evening. My verdict? At least three people now working in this area of the temple recognized me from the baptistry and were thrilled to see me, which made me feel good. In contrast, within seconds of putting on the temple garments for the first time, I could no longer feel them against my skin. I thought it would take at least a couple days to adjust. Most of the ceremony itself was almost disappointingly un-weird. The weirdest part was the clothes, but I had a thought at college graduation two days later, as I looked out at the robes and sashes and silly square hats with tassels, that this graduation clothing was every bit as weird as the temple clothing. All symbols are arbitrary, but the ones we grow up with seem normal while the ones we only know secondhand or later in life seem strange and exotic. We need to recognize this fact in order to avoid being stupid ethnocentric hypocrites. Here I am standing outside the temple with some people afterward. Jen (in the picture), who helped prepare me for this by patiently addressing questions and concerns over the years, took me and whoever else was willing and able to dinner afterward. Audrey (also in the picture) made me cookies. Everyone else needs to step up their game. Kidding, kidding. GraduationSpeaking of graduation, that was also a thing that happened. I wrote previously about how I started school in 2011 and went through no small amount of suffering between then and now. If I had glimpsed, eight years ago on the threshold of adulthood, how much pain lay in store for me, I would have died on the spot. But here I am graduated and not dead, so yay for me. I know eight years isn't a record by any means, even among the small sample size in one of my English classes that I shared with three students in their early thirties, but it's a big freaking chunk of my life and it's a miracle I ever graduated at all. Under those circumstances, I suppose the commencement and convocation ceremonies would have been anticlimactic no matter what. But it would have been nice if I hadn't been too poor to get a cap and gown and actually participate, and if my sister hadn't absentmindedly scheduled her wedding for the same day. That argument went down a couple months ago, and I told her straight up that while I would like to go to her wedding, if it came down to a choice between that and the ceremony I had earned and was entitled to, I would choose the latter. She moved her wedding later in the day so I could go to both and I let it go. But after actually going to my convocation and then skipping the luncheon and rushing off for the wedding, I got enraged all over again and spent the rest of the day very pissed off. A few people took a few seconds to ask how my graduation went, before wandering off to continue fawning over my sister and showering her with gifts and money. This was like the feeling of not being endowed while everyone else was, except much worse. It felt like the most important day of my life, the biggest achievement of my life, the event that should have been the glorious long-awaited culmination of everything I worked and suffered for, a once-in-a-lifetime experience that I'll never get to redo the right way, was hijacked by someone else with a more important accomplishment that made mine all but invisible. It hurt very much. I'm not angry anymore, at least. I think I've processed that and moved on, so I won't rant about it for several more paragraphs like I originally assumed I would. But I think I'm entitled to be honest about the experience for posterity and not pretend it was awesome. I wish my sister much happiness. I barely know this guy and he's not at all the type I would have expected her to go for, but I guess he makes her happy so that's good. There is one picture of me after graduation. As I wandered around greeting some of my friends who could afford caps and gowns and felt inclined to be a part of their ceremony, a high councillor's wife from church asked me to take a picture of their family because her daughter was graduating. She asked why I was there, and I mentioned why and then she made me be in a picture with her family too. I felt stupid standing there in a suit next to a bunch of people who didn't know me, and that's why I'm not sharing the picture here, but it was a very kind gesture and I appreciate it. I also appreciate that my other two sisters wanted to come but couldn't because they don't have their own vehicle(s) out here far from home. And I appreciate Uncle Russ and Aunt Amanda, who, the next day, straight-up asked if my graduation was a disappointment (yes) and got me pizza and ice cream and let me watch Star Wars at their house while hanging out with their adorable children who would have cried themselves to sleep if they didn't get to see me. At least the older four would have. The baby probably didn't care and probably cries herself to sleep anyway. DeathsI want to give a shout-out to a couple people who left us this week.
First, of course, Peter Mayhew (74). I know very little about him and would feel pretentious trying to wax super eloquent about his passing, but because he brought to life one of the coolest Star Wars characters ever, he was all right by me. It seems like just yesterday that I discovered Chewbacca in a Millennium Falcon Lego set and noted with surprise that he had the same name as my cousin's cat. Mayhew liked to share the amusing anecdote of how he got the role just by standing up when George Lucas walked in, but he brought breadth to the role as well as height. His posture mattered, and the facial expressions he made with the limited mobility of the mask, and behind-the-scenes footage reveals that he actually spoke real contextually accurate dialogue before it was dubbed over with animal noises. Most people probably don't know what his voice sounded like or what he looked like, but he left his mark on the character and consequently on the world just the same. Dang it, now I feel pretentious. Less known and tragically much younger, Rachel Held Evans (37) is also gone. She was a progressive evangelical pushing for greater inclusivity and intellectualism within the movement. I discovered her blog because of her posts on evolution, and they were very useful, and I quoted her on this page of mine but I'll repeat that quote here for the sake of convenience and flow. You're welcome. "What we are searching for is a community of faith in which it is safe to ask tough questions, to think critically, and to be honest with ourselves. Unfortunately, a lot of young evangelicals grew up with the assumption that Christianity and evolution cannot mix, that we have to choose between our faith in Jesus and accepted science. I've watched in growing frustration as this false dichotomy has convinced my friends to leave the faith altogether when they examine the science and find it incompatible with a 6,000-year-old earth. Sensing that Christianity required abandoning their intellectual integrity, some of the best and brightest of the next generation made a choice they didn't have to make." Though I belong to a different strain of Christianity, I hope to keep the spirit of her efforts alive in some capacity.
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Last weekend would have been a nice little stake conference if not for just a couple things: the guy behind me who bumped or jiggled my chair at least eighty times, and the departure of President Fjeldsted (pronounced with a silent j and a silent d) from the Stake Presidency. So just like a sacrament meeting five years ago almost to the day when he stopped being my bishop, this stake conference left me sitting here like Except without a beautiful princess who's secretly my sister to comfort me despite having recently experienced her own loss of colossally greater magnitude that hardly anybody seems to care about. My life is so empty. I first met Brother Fjeldsted in September 2012 after a summer of insomnia-induced inactivity from church. My faith was never lost, but it wasn't strong enough to get me out of bed for nine a.m. church after five hours of sleep. When fall semester rolled around, though, I knew I needed the emotional anchor of regular church attendance back in my life, and I also realized that I was an idiot because I could have just gone to another congregation that met in the afternoon. So I did. I went to another ward and I met a couple of really nice people who made me feel much more comfortable than I did in either of my previous YSA wards, and I knew I was at home, and then I met with the bishop one evening and informed him that I wasn't technically part of his ward and he said I needed to go to my real ward because he had no priesthood jurisdiction over the block where I lived. He brought me to the stake presidency, who reiterated what he said and added, "If we let people ward-hop, everyone would just go wherever the cutest girls are." The stake presidency brought me to my real bishop, Bishop Fjeldsted, who conveniently was just waiting in his office. I was not in a good mood. I thought this business of something as trivial as my address being the determining factor of where I belonged spiritually made little or no sense, but I kept that to myself. I figured I would just sit out this meeting with this guy and then go inactive again. Since I was already not in a good mood, I put up walls before the conversation even started. I figured this guy would want to know why I hadn't been to church for a while and why, for that matter, I wasn't off somewhere else on a mission like I was supposed to be at nineteen, and I tried to forestall those unwelcome inquiries by somewhat petulantly explaining those things before he could ask. But Bishop Fjeldsted, a meek, unassuming man with a huge smile, didn't care about them. He disregarded them altogether and simply expressed his happiness and gratitude for me being here. Somehow by the end of the meeting I was willing to come back, at nine a.m. on Sunday. Bishop Fjeldsted recommended I get to know Peter, the Elders Quorum president. I resisted that idea because I wasn't keen on being friends with someone who was assigned to be my friend. But Peter was so persistent that eventually his genuine goodness won me over. This post isn't about him. I should write a post about him at some point. Both of these great men, in any case, became people I could confide in. Peter was a peer, but Bishop Fjeldsted was the first "adult" figure in my life that I could share personal things with and not regret it. He turned out to be from New York and have an Aspie child, so in some ways he was probably better prepared to understand me than I could have dreamed of. I grew to love him and the 36th Ward almost immediately. Not bad for arbitrary geography. (Since then, I became aware of others who attended my ward despite not living in its boundaries or, in the case of one 37-year-old woman, its targeted age demographic. Years later when I informed a high councillor that I was temporarily defecting to the 35th Ward, he said, quote, "Just go wherever the cutest girls are. That's what I would do." Close quote.) Bishop Fjeldsted and Peter were there to support me through probably the worst period of my life, when I almost lost my faith, starved to death, got evicted, and/or killed myself on more than one occasion. They helped plenty with my temporal struggles in their church capacities, but also dispensed plenty of advice and priesthood blessings for the emotional ones that seemed even more hopeless. In particular, a couple of quotes from Bishop Fjeldsted will stick with me forever. In one sacrament meeting he said, "Pride has no intrinsic value, but we're willing to sacrifice everything for it." And that blew my freaking mind. On another occasion, as I cried in his office, he mused, "Our society gives women a free pass to lie for their convenience." And that little observation is why he'll never become a General Authority despite being fully qualified. Of course I felt cheated when he was pulled into the stake presidency. I had built up this relationship with him over a year and a half, and now I was expected to just transfer it over to this new Bishop I'd never even met? It didn't work like that. I had to start over building a relationship from scratch with the new guy, until they replaced him too. I'm not crazy about this system. I'm sure bishops appreciate being let go after a few years, though. Except when they get immediately transferred into the stake presidency. But as a member of the stake presidency, President Fjeldsted still said hi and asked how things were going whenever he saw me, not in the fake way that everyone else does, but as an actual question looking for an honest answer. I still sought his advice a couple times. When I was running myself ragged doing chores and errands almost every day for a friend with Lyme disease that hardly anyone seemed to care about, he told me that I shouldn't overexert myself because she wasn't my responsibility. At the time his advice seemed callous. Now, however, I wish I had internalized it and followed it when a "friend" from high school who hadn't spoken to me for nine years decided to start asking for my money, because if I had told her where she could go after the first couple times, I could have saved myself from months of hell. I'll never make that mistake again. Anyway. So last weekend I said goodbye to him and his wife, and they reminisced about how long they've known me, and he said to stay in touch, and he said "I'm proud of how you've handled everything." And nobody's ever said that to me in my life. I thought I would have to wait until I pass to the other side and fall into Jesus' arms to hear that. Sometimes it feels like my mistakes and shortcomings are all that matter to anyone else. So that was cool. Speaking of death, I dreamed the other night that I went back to New York and found my dog Milo living alone in the woods. I took him to the Kellers' place to play with their dogs, as I often did. But even before I woke up I realized I was dreaming because Milo has been dead for some time and that just took all the fun out of it. In my dream, I almost cried a couple times. I was never able to muster more than a couple tears for him in real life, though I tried. I wanted to experience the normal, healthy emotions of grief. But I had already resigned myself to the fact that he would die much too early and I would have to slog through God knows how many more years of this mortality crap before I can rejoin him. I had this exchange with Bracelets the other day, in fact, after she read through the acknowledgements and blurbs of my book draft that she promised to feedback: I generally think about the hereafter it in terms of my dog because no humans who were particularly close to me have ever died. My church tends to emphasize the whole "eternal families" thing, but so far I'm much more interested in its additional teaching that animals also have spirits and will be resurrected into eternal bliss. And that makes sense because a heaven without dogs is a poor excuse for a heaven. Maybe I dreamed about Milo because Easter was approaching, or maybe it's just a coincidence, but I've decided to make it meaningful for me regardless.
Also, have a picture of me and him because it seems appropriate. This was taken in high school, so the better part of a decade ago. My grotesquely long arms are a little bit less grotesquely long now. I thought this would be a fast topic and let me get back to my novel revision that I aim to have done by Friday, but I was wrong. Regardless, because the emotions we regard as "negative" are in most cases healthy normal requirements to be a healthy normal human, it can be very therapeutic to embrace them sometimes instead of trying to pretend they don't exist. These songs hurt me, but I love them. Not every song can be "Walking on Sunshine". I have excluded breakup/unrequited love songs from this list to prevent it from exceeding eight thousand entries, and instead focused on some of the other crap that life has to offer. Enjoy. Bill Mumy - The Ballad of William RobinsonBeing lost in space forever is a special kind of depressing, though if he gets to keep visiting actual planets and having adventures I don't know what he's complaining about. Green Day - Boulevard of Broken Dreams [Explicit]I currently live on Kip Thorne Boulevard, which became a boulevard of broken dreams when I moved here a couple months ago. Harry Chapin - Cat's Cradle The only thing sadder than missing opportunities is growing up. Loreena McKennitt - Dante's PrayerA song that will doubtless by repeated on my upcoming list of songs I want included in the new Latter-day Saint hymnal. Genesis - Dreaming While You SleepI honestly thought the lyrics of this song were some kind of artistic metaphysical nonsense until I actually paid attention to them and was like "Holy crap!" Kansas - Dust in the WindEven if you, like me, believe in immortal souls and another life that will suck considerably less than this one, the reality check of how temporary and insignificant humans are can be sobering. Tracy Chapman - Fast CarA song, introduced to me years ago by my friend Cece, about how poor people deserve to have crappy lives because obviously if they just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps they would be fine (sarcasm). Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy - Heartbeat (Instrumental)Knowing the plot of the movie makes every song from the soundtrack melancholy, but this one really tests the limits of how beautifully (I can't stress that enough) soul-wrenching an instrumental piece can be. Billy Joel - Leningrad"Storm Front" is my favorite Billy Joel album, and most of the songs on it are criminally underrated, including this one. Suzanne Vega - LukaNot just the abuse per se, but the resignation and broken spirit really drive this one home. Stephen Moore feat. Kimi Wong - Marvin, I Love YouOkay, I lied, and don't have the heart to refuse entry to this breakup/unrequited love song by everyone's favorite manically depressed robot, accompanied by an irrelevant cute video. Nightwish - Nemo"Nemo" means "no one" and if that's not cause for introspection I don't know what is. Alanis Morissette - PerfectWith her unique voice and interesting liberties with pronunciation and scansion, Alanis comes across as a very real person singing about real issues, like impossible expectations from parents or authority figures. Mika - RioAgain, upbeat but not upbeat, illustrating low self-esteem and the perceived futility of trying to change things, but in a way you can dance to a little. Simon & Garfunkel - The Sounds of Silence... Kitaro - Symphony of the Forest (Instrumental)As I've mentioned before, this song gave me my first experience with depression and loneliness when I was three or so, and now I listen to it just to show it who's boss. Matchbox 20 - UnwellOnly I and a few hundred million other Aspies have adopted this as our unofficial theme song. Bruce Hornsby & the Range - The Way it isSomehow this song is upbeat but not upbeat, even without getting into the subject matter of racism and civil rights. Scorpions - Wind of ChangeThe fall of the Berlin Wall was a joyous occasion for most, but this hardly comes across to me as a joyous song, probably because it's reflective and nostalgic instead of celebratory. Madonna - You Must Love MeEva Peron sings about her husband staying by her side as she dies of cancer (which isn't a spoiler because the musical literally starts with her death and goes into flashback for most of the next two hours). One group or other at USU recently had a night dedicated to a thing called "body image". What is body image? As far as I can tell, it's a specialized subset of another thing called "self-esteem", referring specifically to how people feel about their bodies. I went to this event because it had food, some healthy, some not so much. And also because this was a topic I didn't consider myself super knowledgeable about and I believe in educating myself and stuff. This will be a fun topic for me to write about and not strange or awkward at all. What always gets overlooked in any discussion about human bodies, the proverbial elephant in the proverbial room, is the fact that all human bodies - male, female, intersex, black, white, orange, young, old, thin, fat, weak, muscular, healthy, diseased, or whatever - are fundamentally the same: disgusting beyond all reason. For real. I don't understand people who claim that learning about human anatomy strengthens their faith in God, because personally it makes me lean toward nihilism. Maybe at some point you get desensitized, but I'm nowhere near that point. A body is basically a mobile odor factory that doubles as a galaxy for bacteria. Even innocuous little things like vocal chords are unnecessarily gross. In one class or other I had to see footage of vocal chords doing "vocal fry", an obnoxious thing that every teenage girl in America does to make her voice sound obnoxious. I could have died happy without seeing that. And it wasn't just me, because most of the class let out noises of shock or revulsion. Humans are grubs. I just needed to get that off my chest and thanks for tolerating me.
The presenters showed us some videos geared toward women but stressed a couple times that their research has shown that men have just as many negative views of their own bodies. Eating disorders, however, remain a predominantly female phenomenon. They didn't address this apparent discrepancy. If I had to guess, I would say it's because our society teaches men from a young age that they're not supposed to have feelings, so they're more likely to repress and ignore their negative ones until they kill themselves. Something like 85% of eating disorders are among females and something like 75% of suicides are among males. Or maybe body image really doesn't bother men as much because they know women don't tend to be as visually stimulated anyway. (Please don't send me death threats for making that generalization.) Personally, I hate every part of myself except my beautiful eyes and average ears, but I don't worry about it very often. I just figure this piece of junk is what God gave me and there's nothing I can do about it, so why stress? Besides, I know it's really my voice, mannerisms, and personality that make me unattractive. Somebody needs to do a study, though - and maybe we could redirect a few billion dollars from Trump's stupid stupid wall to this far more important endeavor - on whether California girls have higher self-esteem than other American girls because of the songs by the Beach Boys and Katy Perry. Really, when you think about it, the Beach Boys song is unnecessarily cruel. They could have just been like "This is our personal preference in girls", but no, they had to be like "The girls in every region of the United States besides California all have their own positive qualities, but they just aren't good enough and we wish they were different." Really. It's kind of awful when you think about it. The good news, however, is that being a true "California girl" is more a state of mind than a geographical designation. If you like sunshine, heavy taxes, and getting cancer from literally everything, then you too can be a California girl. Even if you're a boy. But that's just my mansplanation and it could be completely wrong. The group discussed the phenomenon of movies and advertisements manipulating people to an impossible standard of beauty, again stressing that this is done to men as well as women, though again, I can see how it would have a more negative psychological impact on the latter. This is one of those things that I'm well aware of but get angry about all over again every time I'm reminded. What I wasn't aware of was that the manipulators will sometimes actually mix and match parts - eyes, arms, legs, whatever - from different people. Why do they do this? Because many consumers are stupid enough to buy products that are advertised with attractive people who have nothing to do with them, and to throw money at whatever sewage Hollywood wants to pour down their throats. I will say that while I think Rian Johnson is a godawful writer and Rose Tico is an annoying and preachy character, I respect his decision to turn her attractive actress into a frumpy-looking nerd on purpose. Most directors' idea of a frumpy-looking nerd is a hot girl with glasses. Rose, for all her deficiencies as a character, is a real person fawning over her celebrity crushes and that's awesome. I will say that I don't believe everyone is beautiful, let alone equally beautiful. I think that's a load of crap. "Beauty", at least in the physical sense, refers to traits that most humans are programmed by millions of years of evolution to find attractive because they signal reproductive fitness. ("Cuteness", though sometimes used interchangeably and able to serve a similar purpose, refers to specific kinds of imperfection, e.g. a disproportionately large head, that are meant to signal helplessness and trigger instincts of care and protectiveness.) Preferences differ between individuals and across cultures, but the basics are pretty universal. Most of us at first glance find certain people more attractive than others, but most of us are woke enough to know that looks don't really matter, so in order to resolve our guilt we tell ourselves and each other that "everyone is beautiful". We all know on some level that this isn't true but we try not to think about it too much because then we would feel guilty for having evolutionary instincts. What if, instead of repeating this lie, we taught our children from childhood up that everyone has the same intrinsic worth independent of what they look like, how they talk, how they dress, who they vote for, and so on? Of course, most parents are already trying to instill this value in their children, but obviously we as a nation and as a world need to do a much better job of it. Society is no help. While preaching out one side of its proverbial mouth that "everyone is beautiful", it does all this airbrushing and Photoshopping and objectification crap that broadcasts the insincerity of its first message to anyone with half a brain. We're supposed to believe that plain and ugly people don't exist, so this frees us to guiltlessly dehumanize them. There was a viral meme on Facebook a few years ago where jerks shared pictures of people that most of the human race would consider ugly with captions like "Will someone please tag so-and-so, he left his whatever at my place last night". I think most people who did this never realized how mean-spirited it was. News flash: most people in photographs on the internet are/were real people. Momo is an exception. Probably. The societal hypocrisy was even apparent in one of the well-intentioned videos the presenters showed us. It was that video that went around Facebook a few years ago where this forensic artist asks women to describe themselves and then he asks other people to describe them and the pictures he draws from the latter descriptions are more attractive. Even though this video says that "You are more beautiful than you think you are", it implicitly affirms that some features and some people are less beautiful than others. The first pictures are clearly meant to be less beautiful than the second, but they still look like women. One woman says something about the size of her jaw, indicating that she has low self-esteem and sees this feature differently than other people, but this only matters if some jaws are less attractive than others. And we all know that they are. The world is horrifically unfair. But I believe it's almost always better to acknowledge harsh truths than tell ourselves comforting lies. We need to cope with life as it really is, or spend as much time as possible escaping from it into sci-fi and fantasy worlds like I do. Speaking of women, a federal court recently noticed that requiring men to register for Selective Service in order to be granted rights that women are granted by turning eighteen is constitutionally indefensible. I think a perfect solution to this problem would be to abolish Selective Service, but nobody asked me, and it's more likely that within a few years women will be required to register and then get drafted when North Korea bombs us. So now conservatives are rhetorically asking, "Is this what you wanted, you stupid feminists?" and the feminists are like "Uh, yeah, actually it is, thanks." If I cared about the future of the human race, I would point out that males are much much more expendable from a reproductive standpoint and that sending a more or less equal number of females to their deaths in the event of war would not prove beneficial to our species or society in the long run, but what's the human race done for me lately? In conclusion, God - whom I still believe even though the nightmare-inducing hideousness of His alleged greatest creation poses a significant challenge to my faith - loves you the same as everyone else no matter what you look like. He doesn't care what you look like really at all. "[T]he Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart." Possibly necessary clarification to last week's post: I don't find Betty and Tamsen annoying. I think they're cute and funny. But I don't find Willie Scott, Navi, Jar Jar Binks, L3-37, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez annoying either, so take my opinion with a proverbial grain of salt. Moving on, I got this piece of paper this week. To be precise, I walked into my previous apartment and it was sitting on the counter so I stole it. Finally I have confirmation that I didn't flunk anything last semester. I wasn't man enough to check, but I had my concerns about Magical Realism and Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing. I just wasn't smart enough for Magical Realism, and also I stopped participating after the first day when half my classmates laughed at my awkward phrasing of a comment. Of course the professor did nothing about it and instead penalized me for not wanting to talk anymore, because that's how life works. But Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing was another kind of hell altogether. I didn't think it would be. I did pretty well in normal Creative Nonfiction Writing. Russ told me that my voice was unique enough to make him willing to read just about anything I write, that my essay "Ass Burgers" was one of his favorites of the term, and that I should strongly consider expanding it into a full-length memoir. Of course I also got plenty of constructive criticism because that was the point of the class, and I took it gracefully. I'm not afraid of criticism. I want to improve the shortcomings that I know exist in my writing, so I like it when people point them out. The Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing class was a different beast altogether. Jennifer decided we were all going to write "flash nonfiction", which is two or three page essays where every word counts and there's a second, deeper meaning behind the story. Frankly, I think that sort of thing is pretentious more often than not. I put "deeper meanings" in my novel to make it more interesting, but they're subtle and nothing is really lost if somebody misses them. My novel's purpose first and foremost is to be an exciting adventure in space, period. And in nonfiction, I don't even have the freedom to make up events that serve a certain narrative. More to the point, this metaphorical stuff is not my native language. I don't even like metaphors. Similes are all right, but this concept of saying that one thing is another thing when it's not has always rubbed me the wrong way. I only get used to it with cliches that are so overused that nobody ever thinks about what the actual words of the metaphor literally mean (e.g. rubbing me the wrong way). Even those pissed me off when I was little. Why do you ask "Can I see that?" when you're already looking right at it, jerk? The possibility of talking to the university's Disability Resource Center about my autism had been presented to me, but I didn't go through with it because I didn't think of it as a disability in the context of academic stuff. It's mostly just a disability in making friends, being attractive, and getting an adequate amount of sleep at any point in my life. If I had thought about all the class participation I would be expected to do, I probably would have talked to the people. But I'm smart, and I'm usually a great writer in large part because of my autism, and I didn't see myself as having a disability that the university needed to address. I'm not used to writing garbage. I'm used to writing really good stuff that I'm really proud of until the next day when I'm sick of it and think it's garbage. In my attempts to fit the mold set out by this class that was completely disloyal to the way my brain works and anything I would ever write voluntarily, I wrote garbage. It wasn't great for my delicate millennial self-esteem. Like Indiana Jones in "The Last Crusade", I faced three devices of lethal cunning. The first challenge was finding anecdotes from my life that could be condensed so briefly. Technically our essays didn't have to be about bad things, but that's what makes for compelling literature. I wrote about stuff like the time my parents' friends' daughter convinced me to help her pull all the limbs off a daddy-long-legs, the time I was alone with an older male relative and he whipped out his disco stick and exhorted me several times to suck it, and the time a girl I met online pretended to be in love with me because she thought we were both joking. The second challenge was thinking of deeper meanings that could be applied, and Jennifer assured us that an overarching theme would evolve for our chapbooks at the end. My overarching theme was that I'm insecure. The third challenge was deftly weaving these meanings in such a way as to enrich the essays without either being too subtle or insulting the reader's intelligence. I failed miserably at that. Nobody understood what I was going for in any of them. My first workshopped essay was about the incident already related here. In addition to it being garbage, I made several stylistic choices that people didn't understand. I put in quirky details that I just thought were interesting, like the bridge over the St. Lawrence River that wobbled when we jumped on it, but people expected them to have relevance to the story and then they didn't. Okay, fine. I mentioned that my friend's house "once served as a bed and breakfast but now serves as a far more modern and permanent business: a video rental store." While this may not be a great joke even by my standards, I would certainly hope it's recognizeable as one, but a classmate felt the need to say that she didn't think a video rental store was a modern or permanent business. So there's an unwritten rule not to attempt humor in these serious artistic ventures. I put the whole work in present tense because that seemed to fit, because I wanted to write it from the perspective of idiot teenager me while only hinting that the increased wisdom and regret of adult me, and this led Jennifer to speculate out loud (in gentler terms, of course) that maybe I'm still a homophobe. Going into detail about one of the friends who happened to be the weirdest friend I've ever had, without focusing the essay on him, was admittedly a huge mistake. Again, I thought his weirdness was just interesting, but it confused the crap out of people. Granted, this guy in person also confused the crap out of people. So I scrapped the original essay completely and wrote one about him instead, about how I hated him at first but then I realized he was a person with feelings too and it was really sweet. You can imagine, anyway, that in this workshop I felt eaten alive like in no workshop before and didn't feel like coming back to class ever. But I did because I didn't want to flunk, and eventually I noticed that the one person who knew me from a previous class, one where I was actually good, had messaged me afterward to say she didn't agree with all of the others' assessment and felt they had treated me unfairly, so that was nice of her. I'd screenshot the message if I could get back into Canvas, but I can't so you'll just have to decide whether I'm a trustworthy source. EDIT: The trust I know you placed in me has been vindicated! I did write one essay, the night before the chapbook was due, that I don't think is garbage. Mind you, I'm not saying it's great, but I can read it without throwing up and I think it's the closest I ever came to the objective of the course. I may have slightly improved on this skill that I have little or no intention of ever consciously using again. At least enough to not flunk the class and be prevented from graduating, which is good enough for me.
My parents never let me have a Nintendo or a Playstation. It shouldn't have been a big deal, but I had enough trouble making friends already without being unable to participate in my church and school peers' conversations about the video games they played on the Nintendos and/or Playstations they all had. So it wasn't a small matter when we visited my grandparents one year and Aunt Laurel or Aunt Michelle – they're twins, so I don't remember which – asked if I wanted to use their Nintendo. I asked if they had any Legend of Zelda games. They said they did have one, and they put it in and the rest was history. I'd only seen one Legend of Zelda game, “Majora's Mask”. The kid who owned it never offered to let me play, but I had so much fun just watching him that I fell in love with the series. Laurel's and Michelle's game was the prequel to it, “Ocarina of Time” – which, unknown to me then, is widely regarded as not only the best Zelda game, but one of the greatest video games of all time. Understandably so. It sucked me in just as much as the first. I played it every chance I got, trying to compensate for years' worth of missed opportunities in two weeks. Laurel and Michelle had to play for me half the time since I didn't know where to go and didn't dare take on the Bosses myself, but that was all right. Link was the default name for the protagonist, but I named him Christor. I don't remember if there wasn't room for Christopher or if I just assumed there wasn't because there seldom was. Anyway, Christor started the game as a small, unassuming boy from the middle of nowhere. A silent protagonist, in fact, with no dialogue beyond grunts and shouts. At one point in the game, Christor drew the Master Sword and opened up the doorway to the Sacred Realm where the sacred artifact, the Triforce, lay hidden. And suddenly he wasn't a kid anymore. He was too small to wield the Master Sword, so it put him to sleep for seven years. When he awoke, he was a ten-year-old in a seventeen-year-old body, forced to grow up too fast and emerge into a darkened world full of evil. Because it also turned out that his quest to stop Ganondorf from stealing the Triforce had enabled Ganondorf to steal the Triforce. Christor, the alleged hero, had royally screwed everything up. But it wasn't his fault. If only he hadn't listened to Zelda, Hyrule would have been in that mess. Then there was a whole new quest, a much longer and more difficult one. The rules were the same, building off what he had learned in his trials as a child, but the puzzles got harder and the enemies got stronger. At least he'd had a chance to learn, to prepare before growing up. But could anything really prepare him for what he had to do? In any case, he must have been terrified. He must have lain awake at night sometimes, sweating and palpitating over the things he'd seen and experienced. When all was said and done, though, Christor was significant. Christor made a difference. Christor saved Hyrule. And then Zelda, realizing that everything was her fault, sent him back in time to before he fell asleep, so he could live through the years that he'd missed. Since he never said anything, I never knew his thoughts on the matter. I wonder if he considered it a blessing to live time over, or if he worried about all the mistakes he would now have a chance to make. After his one big mistake that wasn't really his fault, he'd been safely out of harm's way for seven years. Now that would be undone. Another side effect of this was that Ganondorf's reign was prevented (why didn't they just do that in the first place?) and people no longer remembered what Link had done for them. After all the countless hours he spent serving people and being a hero, he didn't even get to attend the victory celebration, and then nobody cared at all. As far as they were concerned, he was insignificant, even nonexistent. I didn't think about all these implications while I was playing “Ocarina of Time” as a child, but I think about them now. Ta-da! Notice how I tried to subtly manipulate you into feeling sorry for poor little me? Did it work? So was this piece of paper "worth it"? Was it worth the seven and a half year wait, the change of majors, the leave of absence, the mornings I walked to campus at quarter to seven with ice in my hair, the mornings I got up even though I didn't want to be alive anymore, the loss of my scholarship after I spiraled into depression and stopped giving a ---- about school, the suicide attempts, the tens of thousands of dollars of debt that I'll be stuck with for God knows how long, the research papers I wrote when I could have been doing literally anything else, the countless rejections large and small when I tried to build a social circle or get a date? Not really, no. Not when it turned out to be virtually useless because in today's economy I need a Masters' degree to be worth anything. But it's what I came for and now, after a ridiculously convoluted and circuitous journey, I have it. I guess it was worth the handful of really good enduring friendships I did get, and, oh yeah, I actually learned a few things. From my current major I learned how to be a better writer and from my previous major I learned how to explain to creationists that they're wrong. Even though, given the state of my health, I don't anticipate living past my early forties, I don't mind having my own pace of adulting that's slower than almost everyone else's. It's not the absolute slowest. There were three people in Advanced Nonfiction Writing in their early thirties. And as far as I know they're still in school this semester while I'm not. But it's not a contest because individuality and stuff. And I don't even hate the prospect of graduate school anymore. I hope I can do it here, because nowhere else will do. After all these years I find myself truly, madly, deeply, hopelessly, consummately in love with the Ray B. West Building, Utah State University, and Logan Utah. I'm not cheating on any of them. They're like a Siamese triplet kind of deal. I wonder if graduate school will take another seven years? I was just thinking in terms of that one biblical story today, that if I had started working for a wife when I came to Utah, by this time I would have one and I would only need to work seven more years for the one I actually wanted. That's kind of a messed-up story when you think about it. |
"Guys. Chris's blog is the stuff of legends. If you’re ever looking for a good read, check this out!"
- Amelia Whitlock "I don't know how well you know Christopher Randall Nicholson, but... he's trolling. You should read his blog. It's delightful." - David Young About the AuthorC. Randall Nicholson is a white cisgender Christian male, so you can hate him without guilt, but he's also autistic and asexual, so you can't, unless you're an anti-vaxxer, in which case the feeling is mutual. This blog is where he periodically rants about life, the universe, and/or everything. Archives
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