It's a shame that "agenda" has become a dirty word. If I pointed out that Disney has a clear and unmistakable agenda to fill Star Wars with more women and non-white people, most would assume that I'm racist and sexist and see this as a bad thing. But Disney does have such an agenda, and I see it as one of the few things they've done (mostly) right with Star Wars. (I say "mostly" because actual character development seems to be less than an afterthought in some cases.) I'm not exaggerating when I say that the lack of women and non-white people was previously the biggest flaw in an otherwise stellar franchise. And as I've grown more sensitive to these things, I've implemented the same agenda in my not-yet-published and still-evolving novel.

Some years ago, before the new batch of Star Wars movies, I proactively went through my draft and made more characters female just because it seemed like the right thing to do. My two protagonists were already female (hence the working title that will definitely be replaced with something better someday, "Space Girls"). I had no agenda in mind when I made that decision at the beginning. It was just something I tried out and for whatever reason it made them more real to me and more interesting to write than my previous male protagonists who were flat and hollow and stupid, and I did this before Rey was ever a thing, before Disney even bought Lucasfilm, but now they'll make their official debut long after that fact and I suppose it will look like I'm just jumping on the bandwagon. It never occurred to me, though, to make them anything other than white. Crossing the gender barrier was somehow more intuitive than crossing the skin color barrier.

Of course, skin color is handled differently in the non-visual medium of writing, and often glossed over altogether. Most works of fiction in the U.S. have historically been written by white people to an audience of predominantly white people who will assume that all the characters are white unless otherwise implied or specified. So in the original 1980 novelization of "The Empire Strikes Back", Donald F. Glut makes no mention of Luke's or Leia's or Han's skin color, but introduces Lando as "a handsome black man". I presume Mr. Glut didn't and doesn't have a racist bone in his body. But this kind of unconscious bias is something we take notice of and try to rectify nowadays. Contrast it with Alexander Freed's 2016 novelization of "Rogue One", the most diverse Star Wars film up to that point. Every main character is given a detailed description of his or her appearance, but with no mention of skin color whatsoever.

Just a few months ago I tried to diversify my novel in like manner. Of course, most characters are never given a level of description sufficient to justify mentioning skin color or national origin, but most of them had boring "white" names and were white in my mind. My unconscious bias was at work because I'm white and I grew up surrounded by white people - my middle and high school combined literally had like five black kids - so of course that was how I would visualize the world unless prompted otherwise. I replaced a majority of these "white" names with various Hispanic, African and Asian names. All but one of the more prominent characters were also white (or half-white, in the case of one human/alien hybrid) so I changed some of their descriptions and tweaked a few of their names to rectify that. However, I didn't feel at liberty to make such adjustments to the two protagonists. They're at the center of the story I began nearly a decade ago, and to me they were like real living breathing people that I couldn't just alter as it suited me. The most I could do was decide that one of them is half Northern Paiute.

I did not use any labels like "white", "black", "Latino" or so forth, as they seem a bit heavy-handed for my purposes. Within the world of the story, national and ethnic boundaries are all but nonexistent. People of Earth live under one overarching government and collectively regard themselves as "Earthlings". Current categories of race within the Earthling species have been supplanted by the differentiations between Earthlings and other sapient beings from other worlds altogether. "Racism" is no longer about skin color so much as the number of eyes or tentacles someone has. So I just describe Earthling skin color as "pale", "tan", "dark" or what have you, and let other contextual clues like the names or accents fill in the rest. To me this makes sense and is an ideal which we should be striving for in the real world (even though our chance of meeting other sapient beings anytime soon isn't great). "Race" is a social construct that misleads people to believe in divisions within humanity that don't actually exist. Discarding it with all its associated terminology and baggage is, of course, quite impossible at this time. But I think we should be striving toward that end.

Now if anyone has actually read this far, I can imagine some of them asking, "Who the ---- cares? Why does it matter? Why are you SJWs so obsessed with this identity politics crap?" There are at least three reasons for me to have this diversity agenda.

1. The most obvious - inclusivity. If you haven't had the experience of growing up and seeing nobody of importance in the movies or on TV or in novels who looks like you, then you can be forgiven for not grasping why it affects people so much and why they're so happy for the situation to change. Even if you refuse to try to understand, it should be a neutral thing. You shouldn't feel personally attacked by people who look different getting more chances in the spotlight.

2. A related but more selfish reason - because I find it more interesting. I never gave a second thought to growing up surrounded by white people, but now it feels like a breath of fresh air whenever I have the opportunity to be around a substantial number of people who look different than me. Diversity for its own sake is just beautiful, okay? I don't know how else to explain it. And most of the name replacements I made in my novel are objectively superior to the originals anyway. Joaquin Tolentino is a much cooler name than Jacob Collins. Sorry.

3. Because, get this, it's actually necessary if I want to be realistic (which I do). This reason doesn't really apply to Star Wars because it's a fictional galaxy altogether, but my novel is set in this one, just in the future. And in the year 2153, the United States and Europe and probably all of Earth are going to be way more diverse than they are now. From what I can gather, in fact, white people are pretty much the slowest-reproducing demographic on the planet. In just a few decades they'll probably be the smallest minority of all (and since I'm not a Nazi, I have no problem with that and I'm not complaining in the slightest, just stating a fact). So visualizing a future world that's as dominated by white people as most current American movies, TV shows and novels would actually be absurd. So this means my white and now half-white protagonists are actually minorities after all!

I would agree, however, that this shouldn't matter. No such agenda as this should be necessary. In an ideal world, movies and TV shows and novels would automatically reflect the diversity that exists in real life without requiring conscious and deliberate efforts to make them so. But we, at least in the United States, aren't at that point yet. 

It's always interesting when a discussion on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' former ban on priesthood and temple blessings for people of African descent partially morphs into a discussion on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' severely deficient dating culture, as happened recently in the comments section of a blog post about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' current circumstances and future prospects in Brunei. At least I say it's interesting because then I can copy that discussion and save myself a lot of effort. Selected comments follow.

First, some guy named Tony complained about President Nelson not apologizing for the ban when he spoke recently at the NAACP convention. Many people think the Church should apologize, but for whatever reasons, it hasn't and at this point is probably never going to.

[C]hanging your mind later doesn't make up for the tears, heartache and pain. I lived in London before the ban was lifted and there were quite a few black members. We had black women married to white men. He could go to the temple do his endowment. She couldn't and couldn't be sealed to him or their children! Can you understand that heartache and pain? While we went to priesthood meeting the black male members had to sit outside! While we went to the temple and served missions they couldn't! While we had many different callings they were restricted to Sunday school president or teacher! Can you comprehend how that made people feel. I sat with people who broke their heart because they were good members but because of their skin colour they couldn't be full members!No retro fitting of history changes that trauma but an apology would help!

Then this guy Johnathan chimed in and I was very impressed by what he had to say.

With all due respect, I can to a degree understand that pain. I am not a black person, but I am a single man in his late thirties. Because of my single status, I've been denied visiting my nieces and nephews in primary and made to wait outside due to the teachers thinking I'm a "weirdo" or a "pervert" due to my single male status. I was released from my calling in the young men leadership as soon as a new bishop was called, because that bishop was prejudiced against me due to my single status. Before the release, he would sit in our classes, micro-manage and interrupt each time I would try to speak, despite the fact I was trying to bear testimony or share uplifting experiences from my mission. This same bishop refused to allow me to go on a temple trip to Manti with my own teenage nieces and nephews, not because of any worthiness issues on my part, but because in his own words, having me as a single adult man in his thirties on the trip would be "innapropriate."

He's not the only bishop or congregation to treat me this way, either. When I was 33, I went to the closest YSA ward I could find to my house (I had just moved) and was rudely told I didn't belong there due to my age. 

The Stake President's wife in my current stake asked me if I needed to have a worthiness interview with her husband because I had made the offhand comment that I, "wasn't in a huge hurry to get married."

As a YSA and an older single adult, I've been handed pamphlets from prophets and apostles condemning me for being single - accusing me of not having my priorities straight, not being eternally minded, being lazy, shiftless, or a "menace to society." I've sat through lectures from Institute teachers, Bishops, Stake Presidents, and Apostles and Prophets during the Priesthood Session of General Conference accusing me of being unworthy, sinful, not honoring my priesthood, etc., simply because of my social status, and not based on the actual thoughts and intents of my heart.

For years, these experiences taken together filled me with bitterness and anger towards the church, and severely tried my faith. However, through a long difficult period of personal reflection, prayer, and scripture study I've come to realize a few things:

One is that you can't sit around waiting for other people to apologize to you (no matter how justified you are in your position). As a follower of Christ, your first responsibility is to love your enemy, bless them that curse you, do good unto them that despitefully use you. Jesus didn't say, "Refrain from doing good until you've managed to cast the mote out of someone else's eye." We know what he did say, and it involves changing the mind and the heart of the one person you have control over - yourself. 

On my mission, when Elder Eca from Nigeria was handed a copy of the Church News pertaining to the 25 year anniversary of the 1978 revelation on the priesthood, he bore his testimony about it. He served in the inner city in Louisville Kentucky, and he was constantly asked about the priesthood ban. 

His response? 

"I don't care. We didn't have it then, but we have it now, and that's what matters."

The 1978 revelation is retroactive, as is the Atonement of Jesus Christ. All who didn't receive the blessings who are still living can now go to the temple and be baptized and be sealed. We have African and African Americans who hold the priesthood now and are serving as general authorities of the church. And all who died before receiving these blessings will receive them by proxy through temple work. This is stronger than a verbal apology. This is action to right the wrongs of the past. Besides, Christ himself already made the ultimate apology, he apologized to the Father for all our mistakes, including the mistakes made by our leaders. All of these injustices are swallowed up in His infinite Atonement.

Then Dane, the resident tough guy, offered a word of caution.

Johnathan: While I admire your turn the other cheek attitude, I also hope you haven't become a doormat in putting up with these types of behaviors. There is nothing inherently wrong in standing up for yourself and sometimes in life, it is essential to do so lest you begin to lose your mind. Too often in life, and particularly in the Church, things get swept under the rug.

Johnathan took the advice in stride.

Very true, and I appreciate your concern, too.

While I do believe there are times to turn the other cheek, I recognize there are times to defend oneself, also. 

However, one of the main things I'm wary about in myself (or in others who have been wronged) is developing a victim mentality because of the injustices performed against us.

A few years ago, I had a bishop who I felt was being unfair with me. He'd cut me off when I'd speak to him, wouldn't let me elaborate or explain my situation, and only gave me questions in interviews that I could answer with, "Yes, sir!" I got tired of that behavior after a while and made clear to him that he was being manipulative. He apologized, and respected me after that. 

Recently, regarding the bishop I mentioned in my previous comment who wouldn't allow me to go on the youth temple trip to Manti, I confronted him about his treatment of me (and others in my ward who had special needs), as well. Unfortunately, he is a military person who acts constantly like, "It's my way or the highway." I was so upset with him for a while that I actually was worried that I might get in a physical fight with him. I can be a fiery tempered person, and so I have to watch myself and my temper. 

After a lot of consideration, prayer, and talking with family and friends about what to do about the situation (I was prepared to take my concerns to the stake president or higher), the words of a scripture I'd memorized years earlier kept coming back to me: 

"The Lord shall fight for you and ye shall hold your peace." (Exodus 14:14)

I felt that I needed to step back, forgive the man (let go of all the anger I had towards him - despite the fact that he wasn't changing his behavior as fast as I would have hoped), and see how the Lord would handle it. 

Fortunately, that story has a happy ending (at least for now). 

About six months ago our Stake boundaries were rearranged and I was placed in a different ward from him. That solved my problem, but I was still worried about other members of his ward (some who were friends of mine) who had also had problems with him. Luckily, he was released (two-years early) from the bishopric about two months ago. I had also found out through the grapevine that some members of the ward were possibly taking their case against him to the church's legal department, which may have lead to the release. 

Yes, sometimes we need to fight, and other times it's better to follow the example of Zion's Camp, where we initially think we have to fight, but really the Lord is testing our patience and wants us to "Stand still, and know that I am God."

For every bishop and ward member who has been a jerk to me, I can name other bishops or ward members who've been kind or friendly or considerate. And I've even seen some of those jerks come around and let go of their old prejudices through time and patience. 

I'm not saying that what happened with that last bishop of mine will happen in every case of a leader we disagree with, but I do advocate for taking each scenario one at a time and turning to the Lord for specific answers.

Perhaps feeling a tad guilty for splitting the discussion in half, Johnathan brought it back around in his next comment.

One thing I forgot to mention was how the Priesthood Revelation has affected me personally. 

Because of it, I'm now sealed to two members of my extended family with black heritage: a cousin-in-law from Nigeria, and a sister-in-law from Brazil (who has probable African roots, as well as probable native-indian Brazilian roots).

Additionally, I've dated African and African American women in the past (both named Keisha, coincidentally), and wouldn't be against someday marrying a black woman if I happen to meet one I'm compatible with.

We could have all left it at that, but I I wanted to express some empathy and camaraderie to Johnathan. Dating is utter garbage. Dating in the Church of Jesus Christ is, if possible, doubly so. (Every YSA acknowledges this. It's just that most of them think it's worth it for the chance to get married, but I don't.) And I could have spent a couple hours writing a tirade against it, but I exercised restraint and tact instead. I'm occasionally capable of that.

There is a horrific double standard in our culture. When a man in single, it's his fault and he should be condemned. When a woman is single, it's a man's fault and she should be pitied. What if we all minded our own business?

That set him off again, and it was glorious. Not because I reveled in his discomfort, but because he gave our culture a piece of his mind that it so, so richly deserved. And yet he was so calm and articulate.

Very true. And I'm well aware of the disparity between how male and female singles have been talked to and treated for years in the church. 

I've heard all women praised from the pulpit for being beautiful, lovely, of good report and praiseworthy, or being sweet spirits, whereas the same speaker has cast doubt as to there being any single man living his priesthood to be worthy enough for them. 

I've had a bishop who would excitedly welcome ever single woman in the YSA ward with a big hug (as if they were his granddaughters), but when I walked up to talk to him and introduce myself, he kept his distance and stared at me like I was a drunken hobo who'd wandered in from the street. And that's not just the first time I met him, that happened on several occasions while I was in his ward.

I had a Stake President sit us all down as an Elder's Quorum and give us a lecture about how it was our duty to "date every girl in the ward." Not taking into account the individual worthiness of these women, or the strength of their testimonies, or whether or not they had any social skills, or dressed or acted in a way to attract the opposite sex, or were good conversationalists, or whether or not any of us had chemistry with them at all. To clarify, this was not a ward where dating wasn't happening. This was a typical Idaho Falls YSA where dating and marriage were happening all the time, and I was a prolific dater in the ward. When I didn't have a steady girlfriend in that ward, I was still asking someone out at least once a month. But we still got the blanket sweep of, "You need to be dating all these sweet spirits, you lazy slobs!"

And it wasn't just from the leadership, either. I and some other men in the ward had a conversation with three of the ladies where they told us their perspective was, "Every woman deserves to be chased." (Not "chaste," but "chased.") As in, pursued by suitors. Yet, these women were themselves picky. I later asked all three of them on dates at separate times: one stood me up; another went with me to a movie, then never spoke to me again; and another went with me on a date, then didn't speak to me again for months (luckily, she and I became friends a lot later, but she did end up marrying someone else). And they were picky with other men, too.

To be fair, though, it hasn't always been condemning the men. I've heard talks (particularly from institute teachers) where they've said, "If none of you single people (men and women) make it to the Celestial Kingdom, it'll be your own fault!" And another where a man got up and chastised his daughter (who wasn't present), for dumping the boyfriends he thought were perfect for her, so in his mind that meant she now had to "settle."

This benevolent/not-so-benevolent sexism isn't nearly as pronounced in my ward, but it's present, just as it always has been as I've grown up in the Church. We did stop saying "Ladies first" at linger-longers, a commandment that I started ignoring anyway, so that's progress.

I bring these things up, not to condemn these leaders or teachers, but to point out an interesting phenomena I've noticed in the church. I call it the "parents' goggles" or the "grandparents' goggles." Many single people out there will know what I'm talking about. Your parent or your grandparent or your bishop has been happily married for decades, so all they remember now is the good times they had courting their sweetheart, and the happiness they've enjoyed since that union. They've completely forgotten all the heartache they went through from being rejected, stood up, having their love unrequited, or all the searching and struggling they had to do before they found someone compatible for them (and who the Lord also approved of). Additionally, many of them were young in a time period where dating had a more universally accepted social-infrastructure. The rules were clearly set out. The man courted the woman by doing such and such, and the woman either accepted or rejected by doing such and such. I'm not saying it was a better system - just that the gender roles were more generally accepted by the parties involved, so you didn't have as many question marks as to how you were supposed to approach courtship. A lot of the older generation still think dating is just as simple as it used to be, so they're frustrated and blame us singles, assuming that we're just lazy because the process itself should be so simple and straightforward. 

One last problem is getting talks from people who married young or who married their "high school sweetheart." These can be the worst in my opinion. A lot of these guys/gals were the prom king or the captain of the football team, and the girls were a cheerleader or the homecoming queen (insert other popular teenage social positions at your discretion). Yeah! Dating was so easy! I was attractive and popular, so members of the opposite sex just kept lining up to go out with me, so I had to beat them off with a stick! These people generally have no concept of what it was like to struggle with dating as a teenager, let alone struggle through all of your twenties alone, let alone struggle through most of your thirties (and beyond) alone. Dating is completely different for me now in my late thirties than it was when I was fresh off my mission at 22. And people who got married in their early twenties straight off their missions can't grasp that. 

Understand, I'm not trying to be negative. Talks condemning all singles for being unworthy, or ones that talk about how easy the dating process should be, used to really upset me. As a person who has actively dated and tried to get married throughout my entire adult life, anymore I just kind of turn a deaf ear to the talks that don't apply to me, and look for the ones that are more sympathetic to singles in general, or the ones from speakers who I can see actually have been through the trenches with dating and do understand what we go through. And I try to understand that many of these speakers are just seeing us through the distorted lens of "grandparents' goggles," and forgive them for it.

I agree with virtually all of what Johnathan said. Of course, his remarks and my approval of them are not anti-woman, but anti-putting-women-on-a-pedestal. And the people who put women on a pedestal are usually men. Funny how we perpetuate this cycle of abuse against our own kind. It reminds me of how I read in an Anthropology class years ago that women, not men, are by and large the ones who perpetuate the tradition of female genital mutilation on their own daughters and granddaughters, falsely believing that they're being helpful. And I think most women hate being put on a pedestal too. I don't think they want to be worshiped. I don't think they want to be held to impossible standards. Of course, I'm not a woman and I could be completely wrong.

I think I relate to Johnathan because I anticipate being him in a decade or so. Of course, my efforts to date are half-hearted and rare and undoubtedly by my late thirties will have ceased altogether, and I also anticipate being very rich by then and I don't care what anyone says, I don't have a single problem in my life that money wouldn't completely and immediately solve, so the situations aren't entirely analogous. But I've been in love and I've wanted to marry specific people at specific times so I imagine a normal person's generalized desire to get married is like that, but constant, and my heart goes out to Johnathan and everyone else in that same boat. I hope someday our culture will grow up. Until then, whenever I hear an insensitive comment at church or in institute about how I need to ask girls out, I just mentally flip the guy off and let it go. It's not worth getting too upset over.

Two fan films released in the same year covered the topic of a young female Jedi who gets blinded in an accident, spends some time in the woods without her bearded male master, and has to fight someone right at the end. Because I don't know how long each took to make, it's difficult to say whether or not one influenced the other. I don't care either way. They may both have been influenced by Kanan Jarrus getting blinded in the "Rebels" season finale earlier that same year, or Rahm Kota getting blinded in the non-canon video game "The Force Unleashed" a few years prior. And of course, in December "Rogue One" gave us Chirrut Îmwe, who may or may not have been Force-sensitive and may or may not have been born blind. So in summary, 2016 was a big year for that sort of thing.

​At least in the cases where the character was shown or implied to remain blind for a long time, even for life, I can only assume it was by choice. There's no way the Star Wars galaxy doesn't have the technology to fix or replace their eyes for very cheap. But those with some connection to the Force may end up deciding that blindness is a blessing. As Obi-Wan Kenobi said, "Your eyes can deceive you. Don't trust them." Look, it's a franchise about space wizards with laser swords. It doesn't have to make sense.

Filmed in the Provo/Payson area of Utah, "Emergence" is possibly the first good thing to ever come out of there. (Kidding, kidding.) Between that and several of the surnames in the credits, I'd bet my life that most or all of the people who made it are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I'd also speculate that the really cool-looking and criminally underused alien villain is a metaphor for Satan, but maybe that's going too far. What is clear (especially after it gets more or less spelled out in the credits) is the metaphor for depression and anxiety running throughout, and Aleena's battle with and triumph over them. It's perhaps even a bit heavy-handed, but there are worse messages to be heavy-handed about.

The second and slightly better of the two, "Hoshino" is similarly a tale of personal growth forced by the newly incurred disability. The title character starts out as kind of a brat. While "Emergence", from what I can tell, takes place in a day or so, a longer and more realistic passage of time is implied here as Ko's story up to and including the accident is told through flashbacks intercut with her prematurely aged, more stoic self. We don't see as much of her actually coming to terms with or learning to live with her blindness, and it's unclear how long that process took, but presumably more than a day given that the past and present portions seem to take place on opposite sides of Order 66 (if the TIE fighters and her master's absence are any indication).

If I may be so bold (though I'm hardly the first to point this out), both of these protagonists are superior characters to Rey. In very brief windows of time we see that they have obvious weaknesses and/or character flaws, and this makes them relatable and it gives us a reason to root for them. It doesn't make them any less awesome at the end of their respective arcs. Disney seems afraid to write female characters like that because it doesn't want to be sexist, so we get Rey who rarely fails at anything, never needs help, comes prepackaged with the skills to do whatever the plot requires, and undergoes virtually no trial or tribulation to earn her awesomeness. I think that's a huge wasted opportunity. Having more female leads is great. Having strong role models for little girls is great. But it shouldn't take priority over making actually good characters. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

​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."

Recorded for posterity more so than the people of today who already know this stuff.

​Trigger warning: suicide

As much as I want to, I don't like recent Star Wars addition Rose Tico. I know I'm far from alone in that sentiment. In theory, the concept of a character who's not this glamorous action hero but just a regular mook who fangirls over her celebrity crush and then gets sucked into the action alongside him is a great one, but mostly I don't like her because I'm pissed at her for [spoiler alert that shouldn't be necessary because if you haven't seen "The Last Jedi" by now that's your own problem] stopping Finn from making a heroic sacrifice and telling him they'll win "not by destroying what we hate - but by saving what we love." Um, what? a.) Saving what he loves is literally exactly what you just stopped him from doing. b.) 99.9% of wars on Earth and, I presume, in a galaxy far, far away, have been and are and always will be won by killing the other side until they give up. So she's annoying that way.

But I have nothing against her actress Kelly Mary Tran, and even if I did, I would have been disgusted to learn that sexist and racist trolls have driven her to delete all her Instagram posts and leave the status "Afraid, but doing it anyway." Of course, it's not as if she's the first Star Wars actor to be severely harassed - young white male Jake Lloyd was bullied so severely that he quit acting, destroyed all his Star Wars memorabilia, and became mentally ill - but the bigotry in this case adds a particularly vile dimension. But what can we expect in an era when self-proclaimed Nazis fearlessly march in American streets without being shot? Disgusting people are no longer afraid to show the world how disgusting they are, because the most powerful man in the world has shown them that disgusting words and behavior carry no meaningful consequences. It's not going to get better anytime soon.

The Miss America pageant is doing away with its swimsuit and evening gown competitions. I have no stake in the matter, since the only beauty pageants I've ever seen are "Miss Congeniality" and "Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous", but I do idly wonder, not for the first time, why we consider it less shallow to judge someone for their mind than their appearance. People don't choose how smart they are any more than they choose what they look like, do they? In either case, they're born with something and then they can augment it to some limited extent. If anything, people have more control over their looks because plastic surgery is a thing while brain boosting isn't. These are the things I speculate about instead of sleeping.

The Supreme Court made a rather vague ruling in favor of the Colorado baker who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding ceremony on religious grounds, finding that Colorado failed to respect his religious rights, while not clarifying how similar situations should be decided. As unpopular as it is, I agree with this ruling because the Constitution protects religious freedom and does not protect getting a wedding cake from whichever business you want. Whether you consider someone's beliefs to be bigoted or invalid is entirely irrelevant. I believe that generally if you have a problem with a business's practices, unless they include putting human flesh on pizza or something like that, you should just exercise your right to not patronize that business rather than whining to the government to make it do what you want. Of course there are nuances and exceptions and a need for compromise and yadda yadda yadda, and the Court conveniently didn't bother to outline any of those in any sort of detail at this time.

A couple more celebrities committed suicide this week, giving thousands of Americans the opportunity to glean their coveted likes and retweets by pretending to suddenly care about depression and mental health. Most of them have responded with deafening silence to the 123-ish less important people who've been commiting suicide every day, but progress is progress, I suppose. I don't mean to be dismissive of Kate Spade or Anthony Bourdain, but I don't know why we need them as wake-up calls for a problem that is not new. It's just too bad that this administration has cut hundreds of millions of dollars of mental health funding and has perpetuated the stigma against mental illness by trying to pretend it's responsible for the United States' exclusive mass shooting problem. It seems like these are exactly the wrong things to do and say in an era when suicide rates are skyrocketing, but nobody asked me.

I think I know why suicide rates are skyrocketing. I think it's because we've created an incredibly shallow, fake, moronic, greedy, self-absorbed, polarized, annoying, unnecessarily and gratuitously stressful society and people, even celebrities who are supposed to be happy because they have lots of money, don't want to be in it anymore. I sure as hell don't. Sometimes the only reason I put up with it is that a new Star Wars movie is coming out every year. Maybe our society could grow up and stop being crappy and see if that helps. But I won't hold my breath. To end on a more pleasant note, here's a soothing song I've listened to a lot this year.