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.
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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 The three-year-old would never have chosen an iPad over me. The three-year-old worshiped me. The three-year-old said "Hey, watch this!" and did something dumb every time I went two seconds without paying attention to him. But eventually, the five-year-old joined us and explained that she choosed me too. She choosed both. And no, I'm not making fun of her for regularizing irregular verbs, I just think it's cute.
When we had some rare alone time a little later, she said, "You'll miss me so much, you'll forget about your family." Then she wondered about my family's whereabouts, and then she thought it was sad that I didn't live with them anymore. I explained that it's normal to leave your family when you grow up. I told her that when she grows up, she might go to college, she might get married, she might get her own house. I immediately felt guilty for lying to her about the house. She said, "But where's your true love? I know you don't have a true love, but when are you gonna marry one?" I didn't know how to explain to a five-year-old that I have the sex appeal of a road accident. While I was there, I watched E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the first time in twenty-three years. Because I'd read the novelization probably two and a half times before 2010, I forgot what was from where, and the movie, despite being almost universally recognized as one of the greatest of all time, felt incomplete to me. The novelization includes many more scenes and explains so much more. It shares a lot of E.T.'s perspective, Elliott's mom's perspective, and even Michael's friends' perspectives. So in the movie, a lot of things felt underdeveloped and unfinished. I still enjoyed it, but now I really want to read the novelization again. Also, I was in the car with my uncle when it started raining hard, and that reminded him of a massive rainstorm he experienced during his LDS mission to Venezuela, and that led him to talk about how politicians have screwed over the people of Venezuela, and that led him to explain his political philosophy for a long while. He's libertarian. He's not one of the godawful conservatives who's actively trying to build a Christian theocracy and make life worse for everyone who's not a billionaire. He recognizes that Donald Trump is a godawful human being and not the second coming of Jesus. He just believes in freedom. I believe in freedom too. I just disagree about the extent to which certain obligations we have as members of a society should trump our freedom - taking public health precautions during a pandemic, to name a totally random example. He said there are many people on both sides of the political aisle that he'd like to see die long, painful deaths and/or burn in hell for a long time, and I certainly found common ground with him on that point. It was heartwarming. In conclusion, I want to become the kind of person that my little cousins think I am. 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. Trigger Warning: Airplanes
My recent trip to Indiana for my sister Melanie's wedding was my first time setting foot on an airplane in nearly three and a half years. For a time, I didn't know if I would ever set foot on an airplane again after reading about the incident of Aloha Airlines Flight 243 on April 28, 1988, when explosive decompression tore off a big chunk of the roof and ejected flight attendant Clarabelle Lansing to God knows where. I can only imagine a fraction of the mindless terror that consumed her final moments. Okay, I thought after reading that, if I ever set foot on an airplane again, I'm staying seated with my seatbelt on at all times, even if it's a twelve-hour flight. But then I proceeded to read about the incident of United Airlines Flight 811 on February 24, 1989, when explosive decompression ejected nine passengers along with the seats where they were sitting with their seatbelts on. At least one had the good fortune of going straight into the engine and not being afraid for very long. Before learning this information, my biggest fear was the airplane itself falling out of the sky. It had never in my worst imaginings occurred to me that being launched into the stratosphere on my own was a possibility. Silly me. It's no good telling me that airplane disasters are very rare. I know it. They still happen, and if one happens to me, I'm not going to derive much comfort from reflecting on how unlikely it was and what an unlucky s.o.b. I am. It's no good telling me how much safer airplanes are than cars. I know it. I'd rather be in a car crash than a plane crash any day. I've been in three car crashes and nothing happened to me. If I were in a plane crash with no physical injury, I would still relive it in nightmares for the rest of my life. So if anything at all goes wrong on an airplane where I'm a passenger, I want to die, as fast as possible. But as is usually the case after I learn yet another piece of horrible information about the world I live in, I became desensitized to these incidents with time, and returned to my previous default state of fear. I can get on an airplane but I just hate every second of takeoff and every moment that it shakes or jolts or turns slightly. On my first flight I noted the loud noise of the wind around my window, and that it intensified when I pressed against the wall. I wondered what would happen if the window popped out. I assumed it would suck my head out and break my neck. Prior to these flights, I finally renewed my state ID that expired in 2017. It was already expired by a few months during my last airplane trip, and security told me to renew it but let me through both ways anyway. Since then I've also used it to sign up for utilities, sign a voters' referendum against state Republicans' proposed hike in grocery taxes, and visit a friend in prison. White privilege? In any case, there wasn't much incentive to renew it. But I figured airport security might be less lenient this time. Indiana was much nicer this time of year than in December. Very warm, much green. I took some pictures that I'm too lazy to retrieve from my phone for the three people who will read this post. Melanie had a nest of robins right outside her window, and they fledged the same day she got married. She and another sister lived there with my parents, and then I arrived, and then my paternal grandmother arrived, and then my sister and brother-in-law and niece arrived, and then my maternal grandparents and uncle and aunt and six cousins arrived. Nineteen people, fifty gigabytes a month of craptacular rural Wi-Fi. Shudder. I got bounced around through four different sleeping arrangements. Funny Quotes from My Cousins After I toasted a marshmallow for cousin Hannah, she said to her sister Lucy, "Christopher is a kind soul! You are - a murderer." *Playing a card game called "You Gotta Be Kitten Me"* Uncle Russ: Is it wrong to call my son a loser? Cousin Jaden: I learned from the best, or should I say the worst. Uncle Russ: Don't talk about your mother like that. *Playing "Apples to Apples"; the word is "Scrumptious"* Cousin Lucy: I'll tell you who's scrumptious - this person in my class named Mason. *Sister Sarah and I look at each other as if to verify that we both just heard what we think we just heard* Uncle Russ: I don't have enough guns. Melanie got married in the Indianapolis Indiana Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I guess it's kind of a cheap temple compared to the one I'm used to, because I could hear traffic outside while in the sealing room. I thought temples were supposed to be soundproofed. What if a fire truck had gone by during the special moment? Everyone also noticed some kind of loud drip-drip-drip from the vicinity of one portion of the ceiling, but it stopped before the ceremony. The sealer gave good and inoffensive counsel. At my previous sister's wedding, the sealer told her and her husband how lucky they both were to be getting married at twenty-three before they got too settled into their single lifestyles, which I found rather insensitive. This guy would have been justified in similarly telling Melanie and her husband how lucky they both were to be getting married at twenty-one long before their brains are fully developed, but he didn't. My previous sister had kissed her husband long and hard with tears streaming down her face, prompting the sealer to opine, "I think they just had their first family prayer." This kiss was as quick as the one by which Natalie Hinton made me a True Aggie. After that, of course, the guests were to greet the newlyweds as we filed out onto the temple grounds for photo ops, and for some reason everyone made me go first even though I was on the opposite side of the room. I wished someone else had set the precedent because I didn't know what to do. I hugged my sister, of course, but then I didn't know what to do with her husband because I'd exchanged fewer than twenty words with him in my life. I whispered, "Should I hug you or just shake your hand?" He whispered back - but unlike me, in a normal volume that everyone could hear - "You can hug me." Cue giggles. |
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- 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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