I was glad to teach at the college level because I thought I could never teach kids. Now I realize I basically did teach kids. So young, so naïve, so many dumb mistakes that made me think "What part of this is complicated? Oh wait, I've done worse." I must try to keep my patience and compassion with me as I grow older and more jaded and they stay the same age.

On my second day of teaching I felt like I needed to fake my own death so I could quit. Two semesters later, has it gotten better? Yeah. It's been all right. I don't know what else to say. Not amazing, not terrible, probably the best job I've ever had. I didn't discover a secret passion for this line of work that I never would have considered if God hadn't told me to, but I turned out to be better at it than one would expect. I had virtually no experience (though at least, unlike some of my colleagues, I had a bachelor's degree in the subject I would teach). Then they gave me a week of training and a frightening amount of autonomy, assured me that they knew it would be really hard, and set me loose. Of course I had a practicum the first semester and plenty of more experienced people to help out. One of them said at one point, "If a week of training doesn't feel like enough, that's because it's not. Ideally you would've had a full semester."

To most of the students, though, I was just another professor even though I wasn't a professor. My position framed me as an "adult" and an authority figure even though I'm less than a decade older than most of them. I think it made my nervousness and incompetence less obvious. Such blind faith they placed in me! At the same time, some of them were chummier with me because of the age gap. One in particular liked to talk to me about Star Wars as if I were just one of his buddies. I had no problem with that. I tried to relate to them, too, by bringing up my own school experience past and present. I warned them against my mistakes. I said I couldn't tell them not to procrastinate because I'd be a hypocrite, but be careful about it. While making them write research papers, I told them about my own research paper on Legos and gender for Folk Art and Material Culture. I know some of them with Republican parents rolled their eyes at me behind their deactivated cameras, but this is academia and they'd better get used to it. I felt really bad for them getting screwed out of their freshman year, so I tried to give them opportunities to talk to each other, and I told them someday they can tell their kids they lived through this. 

Filling fifty minutes could be a challenge sometimes. I had sometimes just a sentence or two telling me what to teach, and I could teach it in five minutes and then what? I had to think of discussion questions and videos and activities and whatever to fill the time. Typically I went in with a paragraph or so of notes and tried to generate a lot of discussion and go along organically with whatever my students said or asked. It was interesting this semester to compare and contrast my first and second classes. Typically the second one went smoother because I'd already had a practice run. I learned this principle in large part from taking Scott Irwin's Institute of Religion course on marriage three times. I saw how he kind of followed a script but could still improvise and always feel spontaneous. All three times, he went off on a tangent telling stories about his grandfather until the class was roaring with laughter, and then he waited for them to calm down, got a confused look on his face, and said "Was there a point to all this?" That set everyone off again. You had to be there.

But I didn't want useless filler or busywork. Maybe now that I've gained in confidence I'll start introducing additional material altogether. One of my colleagues straight-up ditched the ethos pathos logos stuff, considering it a waste of time. I'm not brave enough to do that. I tried to emphasize skills and principles that will benefit them no matter what they do in the future. I don't think I've had a single English major in my classes yet. I tried to teach them to think, to overcome their own biases and blind spots and respectfully engage with other points of view. If I succeeded, I made them smarter than most Americans and they may save our civilization someday. Though I kept my personal views to myself for the most part, I frequently used American politics as an example of how not to do constructive discourse.

Next semester I will replace the Zoom broadcasts with in-person meetings but keep the online content, because I like it. Teaching in person frightens me but I think it will make discussions easier and smoother, and it will be nice to know what all of my students look like. I'll miss the chat and screen sharing features, though. Also, it will be on Tuesdays and Thursdays now, so ninety minutes instead of fifty, and still two classes back-to-back. For now I'm on vacation and trying not to think about the scary future too much even though it will be here before I know it. Granted, it might not even happen because I might get fired. A couple weeks ago I said something rude to a racist maggot on Facebook and he claimed to have screenshotted it and sent it to "your boss." I'm sure he wouldn't lie about something like that and I'm sure my boss just hasn't gotten around to doing anything about it yet. I'm not sure who my boss even is, though. There are like five people in various positions who could be considered my boss, but none of them tell me what to do very much. I'm not sure the best person to reach out to if you want to get me fired in a hurry. I'm impressed that the maggot figured it out so fast.

I also got this cool certificate earlier this week - it doesn't confer any rights or privileges on me, but it gives me a warm feeling.

[Stuff stuff stuff] Choose at least one internet meme (preferably something that you have personally interacted with). How does your example meet the above criteria of memes as described by Shifman? (250-300 words)

​Because I don't have close friends and didn't get a smartphone until 2017, I've always lagged well behind my own generation and didn't even know what a meme was until the latter half of my freshman year - 2012. I joked in a Facebook status that I was going to sue the creators of "Socially Awkward Penguin" for plagiarizing my life. This coincided with my discovery of a now-defunct Facebook page called "USU Memes". The memes used standard templates known across the internet, but understanding them usually required insider knowledge from the USU community. I submitted a few of my own based on true stories and through that platform I'm sure they got more attention than anything I've made since, especially since social media algorithms have a personal vendetta against me.

They all follow the photo + caption format. The first two memes are stock character macros that rely on readers' knowledge of previously established conventions. The first one can be understood by anyone who's seen the movie, but the second one would confuse the uninitiated as to why this particular text is juxtaposed over a picture of a penguin. Both templates had been circulated, imitated, and/or transformed many times before and since. For the last one, I think the meme would be the popular movie quote itself, "It's a trap!" The particular image of Admiral Ackbar wasn't a widely used template like the other two (though it was a template, as you can tell by the background pattern, which I certainly didn't have the expertise to create myself).
​
Here's a meme that I made last year, relying on knowledge of the convention of transplanting the "Scumbag Steve" hat onto other people's heads. The hat itself is so iconic that it carries connotations of scumbaggery independent of the character himself.

An abstract is a self-contained, short, clear statement that describes a larger work (whether existing or proposed). Scholars are often asked to submit an abstract of their work to be considered for publications or presentations.... [Stuff stuff stuff] ​Abstracts are typically written in the present tense, even if you haven't done the research yet! (e.g. "this research shows" rather than "this research will show"). [??? Okay.] Also, try to dial down on the use of uncertain language whenever possible (e.g. "looking at  X from this perspective might be is useful for thinking about Y". 

(Only my long abstract is included here because the short one is the same thing but with most of the sentences removed.)

Folklorists have written extensively on how gender is portrayed in toys such as Barbie dolls and GI Joes, and subverted (or not) by the children (and adults) who play with them. Ostensibly more gender-neutral toys such as Legos have received less attention. On the surface this makes perfect sense. Traditional Lego minifigure (or “minifig”) bodies are shaped the same, male or female, and are obviously not meant to approximate real human body types, exaggerated or otherwise. Nobody has any concerns about them promoting unrealistic body image. The company also has a policy against including realistic modern weaponry (a category which does not cover swords, cannons, lightsabers, squid launchers, etc.) or glorifying realistic violence in its sets.

However, there are still notable differences in how often male and female minifigs appear, how they are dressed, and/or their roles in the storylines that accompany some product lines. It is also well known that the Lego company markets most of its products far more heavily to boys on the assumption that they will be more interested than girls. Product lines marketed to girls (e.g. Belville, LEGO Friends) use minifigs shaped more like traditional plastic dolls and focus on stereotypical “girl” colors, settings, and plotlines. This raises the question of whether the Lego company is correct in its assumptions about male and female interests, or is excluding many potential customers based on debatable cultural constructs. In this paper, I show that the truth is somewhere in the middle – its girl-marketed products enjoy some popularity among the target demographic, but girls are also more receptive to the mainstream sets than the company supposes. It would be wise to include them more in marketing and to produce more diverse and numerous female minifigs in the first place.

Legos, even more so than Barbies, lend themselves to many varieties of creative play for children and adults alike. By design, the bricks and other pieces in any Lego set can be reconstructed into other things contingent on the builder’s imagination, and the company actively encourages this. It often showcases builders’ creations and sometimes sponsors contests. In recent years the internet has provided a larger venue than ever for people to share “My Own Creations” (MOCs). As part of my research, following a similar pattern to those who have studied Barbies and GI Joes, I determined that the gender demographics of people uploading MOCs are more balanced the company would expect, and that their portrayals of various male and female minifigs often differ from the originals sets and storylines where those minifigs originated.

I also found similar results in other areas such as Lego computer games and movies, and brickfilms – stop-motion films made with Legos, which have become ever more popular and easier to make with the rise of YouTube and digital camera technology. Brickfilms offer the same creative flexibility as MOCs, but have the added advantage of including a clear story and personalities for the minifigs involved. Here, too, girls and (more often) women have taken full advantage of this creative outlet and not limited themselves to the pink products.

Writing Notes:
A Playlist that 100% Accurately Describes What Happens Every Single Time I Experience Writer's Block During a Pandemic
​
By C. Randall Nicholson

Collective Soul – Run

This is perhaps the saddest happy song or the happiest sad song I’ve ever heard. It captures my feelings about the you-know-what and sometimes life in general – simultaneously adapted to and completely drained by it. There’s no sugar-coating how much it sucks, but what can you do?

Rammstein – Keine Lust

Although this song gets me pumped enough to wrestle a grizzly bear (which cannot be found in Utah – thanks, Frank Clark), the title translates to “No Desire”, which is the amount of desire that I have to write when I don’t have any desire to write.

Sami Yusuf – Make Me Strong

I echo Sami’s words, pleading with God to make me strong, though for me the stakes are undoubtedly higher than whatever he had in mind. I’m trying to write a masterpiece, after all, while he probably just needed help with grocery bills or something.

Kansas – Carry On Wayward Son

God’s response to me, or my response to myself, depending on your beliefs. tl;dr: Man up and just do it.

Adriano Celentano – Prisencolinensinainciusol

In this satirical song, the title of which I swear I spelled correctly on my first try, an Italian singer puts on a fake American accent and sings gibberish that sounds like English even to a native English speaker. This symbolizes the gibberish that I write when I’m forcing myself to write even though I have keine lust to do so.

Natasha Bedingfield – These Words

With a bit of revision, I manage to mold the gibberish into something more coherent, but these words still look like something a third grader would write. I console myself that at least they’re less cringe than the time I parodied Cheap Trick’s “Dream Police” as “Sweet Calise”.

Haddaway – What is Love [10 hour version]

This song represents all the intrusive thoughts, YouTube videos, and social media breaks that interrupt my writing time. Maybe just imagine it’s playing in the background the entire time all these other songs are playing.

Alanis Morissette – Perfect

As I continue to revise, Alanis, from inside my head (come on, we all fantasize about her), ridicules me for not producing work that measures up to her standards of quality. I could make a snarky comment about her voice being less than perfect, but I choose to be the bigger person here.

Alison Krauss & Union Station – When You Say Nothing at All
Alanis takes a break to soothe her vocal chords, and laughs in disbelief as her friend Alison goes even further by mockingly pretending to love me and passive-aggressively suggesting that my attempts at self-expression are worse than nothing. “Ooh, that’s cold,” Alanis mumbles, still giggling. “I think you crossed the line with that one.”

Scatman John – Scatman (ska-ba-bop-ba-dop-bop)

Just when all hope seems lost, Scatman makes the naysayers shut the hell up with his poignant reminder that I, too, can rise above my weaknesses to create beautiful words. And like they say, bros before singers whose names start with “Al”, so I listen to him and take renewed confidence.

Saint Etienne – Nothing Can Stop Us

I am invincible. I will persevere. I can do anything I put my mind to, as long as it falls within the limited range of talents and skills that I possess, such as writing.

Las Bibas From Vizcaya – (Do You Have) The Force – Pt I & II

Having found my groove, I let writing flow from my fingertips like the Force. Writing surrounds me, penetrates me, and binds my thoughts and the computer together. Insert obligatory joke about midi-chlorians here.

“Weird Al” Yankovic – Hardware Store

In the bridge to this song, Al sings a list of rhyming hardware store items too fast for most mere mortals to match even mentally, which is symbolic of how articulate and amazing my writing has become after sufficiently revising and finding my groove. He’s exempt from the rule about singers whose names start with “Al” because his first name is Weird. And so is my writing.

Ozzy Osbourne – I Don’t Wanna Stop
​
It’s past my bedtime, and my current mental activity will make it impossible for me to sleep for at least two hours because God hates smart people, but I’m having too much fun! I’ll write right now and suffer later.

Latter-day Saint Charities recently donated $20 million to UNICEF's push for two billion vaccine doses in 196 countries by the end of the year. I applaud such an initiative. It is absolutely unacceptable for only wealthy countries to get the vaccine while the rest continue to suffer for God knows how long. Naturally, the anti-vaxxers whose existence blights this planet are confused and upset at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints all over again, and I've had many opportunities to pass along my post "Follow the Prophet, Even When He Shills for Big Pharma", which has upset some of them even more. When I wrote it, I harbored no illusions that it would change anyone's mind. Trying to convince an anti-vaxxer of reality is like trying to convince a rock to do jumping jacks. I know that, and yet I've still wasted some time arguing with them, and I'm not proud of myself and I'm really trying to stop.

The best I could hope for was to cut through their mental gymnastics and rationalizations about the officiality and unambiguousness of the Church's position on vaccines, and expose them to the full force of the cognitive dissonance they warrant and deserve for knowing that it isn't run by delusional anti-science conspiracy theorists like them, and convince them to have some integrity and admit that they disagree with an official and unambiguous Church position. Even that was expecting too much of them, but I tried. At least when left-wing members disagree with the Church on something - always for reasons that are a lot less stupid - they have the cajones to say they disagree with the Church on something. They don't lie and pretend it's one guy's opinion that isn't binding on anything. Really, the logical leap from "The First Presidency ackowledged that vaccinations are a personal decision" (true) to "The First Presidency didn't endorse vaccines and encourage all members to get vaccinated" (bull) is so blatantly wrong that I'm sure even most of the anti-vaxxers making it know it's wrong. They're just trying to stave off the cognitive dissonance at all costs. And they hate me when I don't let them do that.

More than one person was upset with me for mocking the grieving parents of hundreds of thousands of children who have suffered from vaccine injuries. No, I'm mocking parents who are so stupid that if their kid gets vaccinated and then gets hit by a car two years later, they call it a vaccine injury. More than one person was upset with me for not showing Christlike love to people with a difference of opinion founded on lies that presents a constant direct threat to public health throughout the country, and especially to the lives and well-being of children whose only sin was being born to such idiots. Oh, isn't it funny how anti-vaxxers were always like "Why does my child need to get vaccinated to protect your child" but now they're pretending to know how herd immunity works? We don't need the vaccine, we need everyone in the world to get sick, several million people to die, and the healthcare system to collapse so we can achieve herd immunity. The virus has a 99.9% recovery rate with no long-term side effects or any negative outcomes besides death whatsoever, but the rate of abnormally serious side effects from the vaccine is - well, it's a lot lower than .01%, but that's still a lot because it just is! Or something. I'm only pretending to comprehend their thought process, if they have one.

Last week we workshopped the first thirteen pages of my essay "Things That Rhyme With 'Elise'", which maybe I'll post on this website and maybe I won't. And I just want to say that the workshop was a great experience for how it contrasted with my experience last time I had a class from Jennifer. Last time, as I've mentioned, I was not adapted to the flash non-fiction format she made us use where every detail has to have some deeper layer of meaning, and my classmates didn't understand when I was trying to make jokes in my writing and decided to assume I was stupid instead. I felt eaten alive. This time, everyone gushed about how great it was. I mean, workshops always start with saying what you think is working well in a piece anyway, but you can tell if everyone really liked a piece because they have so much to say. They thought it was funny and sweet and had all these brilliant things going on - some of them intentional on my part, some subconscious, and a few coincidental but I'll take them anyway. My one favorite line from all verbal and written feedback combined is: "I love the way you write about Calise, I feel like I'm falling in love with her with you."

Of course, as this is a little less than half of the current length of the essay, they couldn't see where I was going with it or which seemingly random details will turn out to be important - some even questioned whether Talease, interesting though she is, really matters to the story I'm telling, and oh how I wish I could answer that in the negative - so I'm impressed with the volume of useful feedback they were able to provide regardless. I felt bad having to split it up and make it less powerful, but I'd feel worse making them respond to 28 pages in one go. I was going to do this essay and another essay about something else, but this one will swell to fill as much space as I can give it, and it's what my heart needs me to write about. I've had to be very selective with details and try to choose representative ones that present a good picture and also take the time to dwell on key scenes and not just jump along from one point to another like "The Rise of Skywalker", and there's the whole show vs. tell balance and scene vs. summary balance and so on. My classmates are invested now and they're excited to read the second part and see how this adorable love story will play out.

Yeah... I feel bad about that.

I wish I could make up a different story, to satisfy them if not myself, but I can't because unlike anti-vaxxers, I have some integrity. So the second part is going to break their expectant, excited hearts. I feel like a box of puppies is looking up at me with such love and trust in their eyes as I'm about to shoot them all. I suppose this is a skill I can carry over to my preferred venue of fiction writing. I'll get people to love my characters and root for their success and read with baited breath to see what happens, and then I'll do terrible things to my characters, kill them off even, and my readers will cry and curse me and keep buying my books. I mean, I want my books to be funny, so I won't be too extreme with that direction. But it's a good skill to have and it looks like I have it. I feel so bad.

Since that one incident with the bootlickers, the floodgates have been opened and I've relapsed into being as rude to strangers on Facebook as I feel like, which is very. For example, the other day I finally had enough of this jackass:

I'm sure the thread has been deleted. If he responded at all, he probably said something really original about me not being Christlike. But one can always hope that I managed to prompt some legitimate introspection about his sad life.

But on the plus side, my last two discussion posts for Creative Nonfiction Writing weren't swear-filled rants. So I can be composed and mature sometimes when I feel like it. For one, Jennifer wrote, "​I want to begin where the syllabus begins, with these words: What a strange world in which we find ourselves - isolated but connected, ordinary but extraordinary, temporary but permanent. If nothing else, the pandemic has forced us to live in the present moment because we simply cannot say for sure what the future might hold. While we know that art can only be made in the realm of pure presence, the grief that washes under all of our feet makes the creation of art difficult these days. I am often reminded of what Theodor Adorno said: 'There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.' Most artists would disagree - but I think we can all recognize in Adorno’s words that when faced with largescale trauma it is sometimes hard to see the relevance of art. And yet. What else can we do but sing even if the song is one of rage, dislocation or violence?

"I am asking everyone to think about whether their ability to create has been altered in the past year and if so how. I am also asking you to think about how, or even if, writing is important in these times - how or if it remains relevant. Should we write directly about the pandemic? At one point is it 'okay' to write about it? Can we write about something that we are living through and have no sense of distance? Or is it best to approach our grief through the side door of research or metaphor or fiction?

"And what about the fact that most of us are having trouble even focusing. How do we actually sit down and write?"

So I said,

See, it's not so much that I have a positive attitude as that I'm acutely aware of global suffering and how entitled Americans are. If it wasn't before, the rest of the world is now also acutely aware of how entitled Americans are.

The next discussion was organized by Kelsie and me, and we have to keep an eye on it and respond to posts until Thursday. Kelsie proposed an idea and I proposed some refinements and we settled on: "Think of a work of creative non-fiction (flash, essay, memoir, etc.) that has shaped you as a writer. What did you like about it? What stood out to you that was *different* from most of the genre and challenged the traditional ways of doing it? How do you try to emulate it as a writer?"

​So I said,

Maybe I sound kind of holier-than-thou in both of these posts. I can't help it. I'm just being honest about my perspectives on things. But I think I meant similes, not metaphors, so I've embarrassed myself yet again.

I turned in a little less than half of my essay last week, so as not to force my classmates to critique 28 pages at once. We will workshop it on Thursday. Jennifer didn't mean to make Kelsie and me turn in our essays the same week we were in charge of the discussion, but these things happen sometimes. My essay, by the way, is entitled "Things That Rhyme With 'Elise'", so anyone who knows me very well can guess who and what it's about.

It occurred to me when I started working as a graduate instructor at Utah State University that maybe I should start to be more careful about the things I say online, lest I become cancel culture's latest victim. Speaking of cancel culture, I think Gina Carano is a garbage human and I'm not the slightest bit sympathetic to her, but I do think it's a shame that the future course of "The Mandalorian" will be so determined by real world politics and repercussions. Cara Dune is a cool character. She doesn't necessarily need to be in Season Three, but whether she is or not would ideally be determined by the natural evolution of the story and not by her actress spreading conspiracy theories on Twitter. So for a while I was more careful about the things I say online, but then I kind of forgot about that and just said whatever I want. And because I'm nobody, it never presented an issue until just recently.

It was weird for a few reasons. First, because this is the first time anyone has noticed or cared about my job, and suddenly they were all fixated on it. Second, because the parasites in the Salt Lake Tribune comments section tend to be of the liberal variety. I'd expect to be accosted by conservative parasites in the Deseret News comments section, but not here. Third - seriously? I can't emphasize enough how stupid Jared Tyler is to think I'll face any consequences from USU for this comment. It isn't even in the top thirty least flattering things I've written on social media about police officers. In fact, I have a 25-page essay that I plan to share with my Creative Nonfiction Writing class when my turns come, in which a substantial portion is devoted to explaining exactly what I think about police officers in general and Officer Nelson of the Logan Police Department (may he choke on a cactus) in particular. Oh no, I might get in trouble. I'm so worried.