My Trip to Salt Lake + Heart Rocks

Much to the disappointment of both my regular readers, I'm a bit behind my usual posting schedule because I spent much of the weekend in Salt Lake and also because I've lost so much sleep in the last two weeks that I wish I was dead. The most significant thing to come out of that weekend was that I drank a significant amount of tea for the first time. Because a con man enshrined nineteenth-century pseudoscience as revelation, I was raised with the belief that coffee and tea are unhealthy or somehow sinful, and I'm not even being snarky when I say that belief has been the hardest part of my Mormon upbringing to deconstruct. I have no desire to try coffee because I dislike the smell. I tried a small bit of tea without sugar some time ago, and it was putrid. But this weekend I was killing time with a couple of friends in Salt Lake's Chinatown market, a place I never knew existed, and they wanted to get some boba tea, so as a matter of principle I pushed past my deep-rooted misgivings and got some too. The first sip was weird. The rest were delicious. It had brown sugar and tapioca pearls, which I didn't notice until the first one came up my straw. Little rubbery balls, not much flavor, but appealing in their own way. Part of me still stupidly expected some kind of physiological reaction to the forbidden drink, but of course there wasn't one because it was just a normal drink. Up yours, Joseph Smith.

Then we met up with a couple of other friends and went to a Chinese restaurant that ironically was not in Chinatown. It was a rice noodle soup restaurant, and I think the menu items were more authentic than the ones at Panda Express, but the still left me hungry again a couple of hours later. This soup had beef, cabbage, corn, carrot shavings, cilantro, elephant ear fungus, and a quail egg. I saved the quail egg for last because I knew I wouldn't like it. Also, I was the only one at the table who didn't know how to use chopsticks, so I just struggled through it.

I stayed the night at another friend's house, but he didn't get off work until 12:30, so for a while I was alone with his wife who doesn't speak much English, and that was a little awkward, but she was very nice. I watched the Disney version of Hercules, struggled to get to sleep, woke up in the middle of the night, struggled to get back to sleep, and slept until 10:30. That afternoon, all the other friends came over to celebrate Juanuary, a tradition I was there to experience for the first time. Apparently it's just having tacos in January. Then we watched Coco. It occurred to me that Hercules and Coco both depict absolutely horrifying visions of the afterlife. In the former, Hercules gives up his immortality to be with Meg, and it's supposed to be a happy ending, but it's really not because you know that after they die their souls will be condemned to swim around half-comatose in Hades' giant magic toilet forever, along with everyone else who's ever existed. No wonder this religion lost to Christianity. Then in Coco, of course, dead people's souls only continue to exist until every living person has forgotten about them, which will eventually happen to everyone except for Jesus Christ and Genghis Khan. What is even the point of that temporary afterlife, except to prolong and exacerbate the inequality between famous people and normal people? And how did it work before photographs were invented?

Speaking of death, the high school I worked at yesterday recently had a suicide, so this week it's doing "Hope Week" with the theme "Life is worth living." (Utah has an above-average youth suicide rate, though you wouldn't know it from the imaginary problems its Republican legislature chooses to address instead.) It had an assembly with Tom Ballard, a guy who cuts hearts out of rocks and distributes them to people to remind them that they're loved. (Not to be confused with Tim Ballard, the grifter and sexual predator who founded Operation Underground Railroad.) He brought heart rocks to give to everyone at the school. I forgot to get one before I left. I know it sounds weird, but he says it's really impacted people and even saved lives, so good for him.