I ought to mention more about my trip to New York than just how awful the traveling part was. Here's what I wrote about it in the rough draft of the book I'm working on:

Soon after I started writing this book, I visited my paternal grandparents for the first time in over a decade. (First I had to realize that I was an adult and I could plan a trip across the country on my own, and then I had to save up the money, which certainly wasn’t going to happen while I worked for Kelly Education and ate from the food pantry.) In addition to the passage of time itself, I’d undergone a faith transition, an existential crisis, and my first drug trip, which all may have influenced my perspective. Almost every item in their house, in their yard, or in their garage flooded me with nostalgia, either because I remembered it or because it represented part of their eighty-plus years of life – or even longer, in the case of items handed down from their long-deceased parents. They aren’t wealthy, but they’ve accumulated more stuff than I can ever dream of owning. Thanks, boomers. (My grandparents are a little older than boomers, so they’re excused.)

My grandfather talked a lot about the past. He talked about his childhood, about the people he worked with at his jobs, about what the neighborhood used to look like and what used to be where. I can only imagine how much the changes he’s seen since 1937 have blown his mind. My grandmother, a bit younger, was a teenage girl in the late 1950s and therefore part of Elvis Presley’s main target demographic, and that blows my mind. I kept looking at their wedding photos on the mantel and marveling that they’d been young once and had complete lives and identities apart from being my grandparents. I didn’t exist yet, at least not in my current form, and they didn’t even imagine me. Does that make sense? It makes sense in my head.

Close quote. I thought I had more than that. Oops.

I was also blown away by how green and full of life it was compared to Utah. I think I mentioned that last week. Frankly, in terms of beauty, it kicks Utah's ass. It rained almost every day, and hailed one day.

I was like, "Who the heck are those kids?" And then I looked at the back.

Whaaat?

I can't believe I didn't recognize my own cousins. Of course, I haven't seen them in over a decade. I don't remember how long it's been since I've seen Emily. At the time this picture was taken, she was my best friend. Now she's cut off contact with this entire side of her family. Ah, life. The past slips away forever.

I had a bit of a drug flashback this morning while I was half-asleep and delirious. Not the cool oneness-with-the-universe part, just some of the weirdness. I wonder how often that will happen. It's been almost two weeks since I ate the mushroom gummy. I don't regret it yet.

Today I'm still with extended family, and tomorrow I'm moving to Midvale. Where I was excited before, now I'm nervous and depressed, and I'll probably just have to wait that out. I think this move is a good thing, but it comes with an opportunity cost, as change always does. Anyway, I'm going to make another brief post. Of all the things I could write about after this week with family, I think the most important is a recommendation to all parents or prospective parents of young children to not let them watch an awful show called Blippi. My little cousin loves that show. Lots of kids love that show. But I could tell within seconds from the host's overenthusiasm and goofy voice that he thinks kids are stupid. I could tell the difference between this show and superior kids' shows that aren't excruciating for adults to watch because the writers put some actual effort into them. I knew I couldn't be the only adult who recognized this, so I did some research, and after accidentally finding out about the disgusting viral video that Stevin John did before he became Blippi, I found this Current Affairs article that explains why his garbage show won't help your children develop imagination, critical thinking, or empathy. (I actually think it's kind of weird that the author brings Trump into it, but his points are well made.)

My Blippi-loving cousin is so uncultured that he complained about watching Mary Poppins, which I felt an urge to watch for the first time in a long time because we flew a kite. I appreciate more than ever how funny and heartwarming this movie is and how good the music is. I also realize now that even though it's sixty years old, if it came out today, conservatives would melt down over its woke feminist and anti-capitalist undertones. Of course there are the obvious bits about women's suffrage that don't affect the plot in any meaningful way, but I can also imagine certain YouTubers complaining that all of the male characters in the movie are made fools of by female characters. George Banks is hotheaded and irrational and mean compared to Winifred, and Mary Poppins manipulates him with ease. (I also realized what a gaslighter she is to him and the children, but that's neither here nor there.) Mary Poppins scolds Bert and Uncle Albert for their foolishness. Michael can't snap his fingers, and at a pivotal moment, he says something dumb and Jane tells him to be quiet. Oh, how the YouTubers would hate that if Disney did it in 2024! And why does the movie's female protagonist have to be practically perfect in every way? The Mary Sue jokes write themselves. As for the anti-capitalist part, the bank (run by white males who are portrayed as jackasses, of course) is portrayed as an antagonist. Childlike whimsy and nonsense and frivolous expenditures to benefit wildlife are portrayed as superior to acting self-important and making frugal investments in colonialism.

Jeez, that was too easy. If I didn't hate my mannerisms and my voice, I'd make a YouTube video about it instead of a blog post and make some real money.

A side effect of my recent month of desperately not wanting to be alive anymore was that I grew closer to some extended family members I rarely talked to. I was surprised to learn how highly my uncle thinks of me. I knew he liked me just fine, but we hadn't talked at all since he stopped using Facebook, and when he was on Facebook, we often disagreed about politics. Some of his kids used to love playing with me, but they outgrew me around the same time they all got iPads. His youngest kids weren't old enough to have personalities the last time I saw them. Anyway, I just had a delightful week at their house. They're such a beautiful, loving family, and it was the first time in fourteen years that I went a whole week without feeling lonely. The youngest ones, now five and three, wanted to be around me all the time. They exhausted me, but I loved them dearly. It broke my heart to leave them, and even more to realize that someday they'll outgrow me too.

I had to hold the three-year-old to make him smile because he was crying about my imminent departure. The five-year-old refused to smile. The face she made represented her personality pretty well, though.

I want to share some cute quotes. The five-year-old stumbled upon a deck of Book-of-Mormon-themed Go Fish cards and said, "Where's the wicked Laban?" And then I swear to God she said, "The Lord told Nephi to kill the wicked Laban. But the Lord doesn't actually tell people to kill. That's weird." I was amazed. I don't think I had that level of insight at her age. I just hated church because it was boring.

The three-year-old, in contrast, raised his plastic sword and said, "KILL THE WICKED LABAN! YEAH!"

The morning of the day I left, I was playing with the three-year-old while the five-year-old, to my surprise and disappointment, played with her iPad for at least an hour. I gently inquired whether she intended to do that all day. I was like, "It's just that I'm going to leave today, and I don't want you to be sad and think 'Oh no, I wish I had played with Christopher while he was here...'"

Rather curtly, she said, "But I didn't choose that. What I choosed is the iPad."

And I was like

On Thursday I "defended" my thesis proposal. I use the term loosely, because it's the accepted term, but it's stupid. I heard it over the years and drew the logical conclusion that it meant my committee would play devil's advocate and try to poke holes in my thesis, or at the very least ask a lot of difficult questions about it. What they actually did was say things to the effect of "This is great, we’re really excited about it, here's some advice, let us know if you have any questions." So that was nice. One of the things I want to do is write a satire about race and racism using aliens, and the consensus is that this could be brilliant and wonderful or it could be horribly offensive, but they feel it will be a good learning experience even if I can't use it in the final product. If I have to scrap it I'll just writer a satire about police brutality and corruption, an overlapping but different issue in which I have some small modicum of personal interest.

On Friday my friend Amanda Esplin had her foot amputated. She's lived with Chronic Recurring Pain Syndrome in that foot for about three years, ever since she was hit by a car while serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That means near-constant, almost untreatable pain worse than childbirth. I don't know how she's endured it for this long and I don't know how she isn't consumed with hatred for God for letting this happen to her, like I would be in her situation. She's one of the strongest people I've ever met. Check out her YouTube channel, One Footed Phoenix, and if you're a Pokemon fan, check out her other channel Pokehaven 99 that has nothing to do with her foot getting amputated.

On Saturday I attended my grandmother’s funeral, and cried a bit, and it was poignant and sad and heartwarming and all the things. I didn’t know I would cry because I almost never cry. It just doesn’t come naturally. I think I would be healthier if I could cry more often. I sat next to my grandfather, and he cried pretty loud a couple times, when they told the story of how he met her and the story of when he showed her his farm and said “We’ll never be rich” and she said she didn’t care. I've never seen him cry before and that was hard. It was a great experience, though, to see how many people loved and missed her. Of course I always believed she was a good person, but I didn’t know what an impact she’d had on so many lives. As soon as the closing prayer had finished, a little cousin seated behind me asked, "Is Grandma gonna wake up now?" Oof. I'm glad I wasn't her parents right then. Even under the circumstances, being with so many family members, including ones I haven't seen in like seven years, was lovely.

My friend and colleague Kylie Smith, whom I mentioned a couple weeks ago after she accompanied me to the police station to interview with Curtis Hooley regarding my complaint against Hayden Nelson, participated in a Building Bridges podcast episode on "Intent vs. Impact" in improving relations between current and former members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The podcast host put out a call on Facebook for participants, a mutual friend shared it, I saw it, and I passed it along to Kylie because she's passionate about that very thing, and if you care to take a listen you'll hear her give me a nice shout-out, although she calls me Christopher Nelson, but I forgive her for that and I can prove she's talking about me because look, there is no Christopher Nelson, or any Christopher except me, among the graduate and part-time instructors in the English department at Utah State University. Anyway, I don't listen to many podcast episodes because they're very long and I can't multitask very well, but this one is great and Kylie is so soothing and empathetic that she should be a therapist or something.

My maternal grandmother, Denece Jensen Brighton of Milo, Idaho, died Thursday morning. This post is not a cry for sympathy. I'm doing fine, and while of course I appreciate any and all condolences, I'm not soliciting them. But I have to write the post because she was my grandmother and that's kind of a big deal. It would be rather bratty for me to write my weekly post about something else.

It had been less than five and a half years since her father, Russell Jensen, my final living great-grandparent, died at 94. Both of them were preceded in death by two of her younger siblings, Russell "Arlen" Jensen and Necia Jensen Hartgrave, each in their late fifties. Only her brother Dane remains of that immediate family. What a sobering realization that must be for him. At 73, she was still not terribly old by today's standards, and I would have expected her to stick around a lot longer if she hadn't been experiencing so many health problems in the last couple years. She was the closest to me of all the people who have died in my entire life so far, and as such her death seems to herald a new phase of said life. First the great-grandparents, then the grandparents, then the parents and aunts and uncles - though of course, any number of things could happen to mix up that order, and I don't really expect to outlive my parents anyway.

I'm doing fine. I'm not afraid of death. I probably don't even take it as seriously as I should. I know it's just a step in God's plan, a temporary transition to another plane of existence, and in my mind, the choice between making that transition and continuing to suffer in mortality is a no-brainer. I don't ever want to be in my seventies having brain aneurysms and liver cancer and whatever. It will just feel weird to not see her again for a long time. Growing up in New York I saw her for a week or two every other year, and of course since moving to Utah I've seen her rather more often. It feels weird already to think about her being dead. Maybe it hasn't sunk in yet. I am a little sad that she didn't live long enough to see me accomplish anything, but maybe that's a selfish perspective. I last saw her at my sister's wedding in May. She won't be at my wedding. Not in the flesh, anyway.

Last night I ran through her voice, her mannerisms, her laugh - no particular memory stands out that I feel like writing about at length here, but I tried to keep the whole person in my mind. Yes, there is the usual guilt that I should have talked to her more often while she was alive. I don't talk much to my family members. It's just how I am. I do my own thing and they do their own things. When my sister called me on Thursday, my first guess was that somebody had died because she never calls me and I never call her. But that doesn't mean we don't love each other. I really don't know what else to say. My brain isn't functioning well this weekend. Yesterday I had plenty of graduate school stuff to do but instead wasted the whole day doing virtually nothing because I had no focus or motivation, and I hate myself for it. I'm really not able to give a fitting tribute to my grandmother at this time. We'll see if anything else comes out after the funeral next weekend.