The Five Year Anniversary of This Website (Kind of)

Mid-May marks the five year anniversary of this incarnation of my website, hosted by Weebly, after I moved it from the terrible company Webs that I had used since late 2010. I recently went back to my Webs account to try to recover something I had uploaded there, and they wanted me to take the exact same survey I already took twenty times when I used their company. I kept telling them how dissatisfied I was and they kept not making any improvements. But I took the survey again just to give them another piece of my mind.

Previously, I wrote blog posts whenever I felt like it. When I moved here I set a goal to write one every week, to be consistent so I could (in theory) build up a following. This forced me to adapt a little since I was now forcing myself whether the muse had hit or I had anything in mind to write about or not. The first two years of posts are juvenile garbage in terms of finding my writing voice and political philosophy, but at least I can track my progression and at least they're still better than most of the posts on my old site that are lost to time and won't be missed. The rest of my posts have ranged from occasional garbage, to mostly average, to the occasional gem that I know would have gone viral if anyone besides me had written it. My page views and search ranking have ebbed and flowed and consistently remained nowhere near where I'd like them to be after the countless hours of work I've put into this site. Has it been worth it? No, but if I quit now all that previous effort will have been wasted. So I'm here to stay unless I get hit by a truck or something.

On my home page I introduce myself as an

​Autistic Latter-day Saint Author,
Child of God,
​and Pretty Okay Guy

And now seems as good a time as any to unpack that statement and how each piece of it was carefully chosen.

Autistic - For most of my life, like everyone else in this country and probably several other countries, I've been bombarded with the loud and clear message that mentally ill or otherwise "weird" people should be feared, hated and ridiculed. So one of my highest priorities is to tell this country and probably several other countries loud and clear where they can stick that message. I hope that future generations of kids on the autism spectrum won't have to wait until their late teens or worse before figuring why they're different, that they won't face constant bullying at school for being different, that they won't be hit and yelled at by parents who think their differences are an "attitude problem", that their dating lives won't be absolute hell, and just in general that they won't learn to hate themselves for being different. I'm contributing to this shift in my woefully limited way by refusing to be embarrassed about the way God made me.

I got in an argument with my parents once about how I present myself to the world, as they subscribe to more of a "Just have a positive attitude and nobody will notice something's wrong with you" line of thinking. They felt that I was holding myself back by making such a big deal out of it (as if I'm the one who decided to make a big deal out of it?). They also didn't understand the distinction betweeen lower and higher functioning autism and didn't believe that I have the latter because I didn't match their understanding of the former. I disagreed with just about everything they said, but I did make the concession of changing "Autism" to "Aspie" in my blurb to reduce the potential for such confusion. I had used the terms interchangeably for some time anyway, alternately trading off diagnostic accuracy with name recognition. At first I resented being lumped in with the lower-functioning autistics but then I decided to take on their stigma and their struggle in addition to my own. But the term "Asperger's" and its derivative nickname "Aspie" remained in use despite no longer being a thing since 2013, and like many others, I had some irrational fondness for them.

But then just recently - and in my defense I believe this has only been known for a couple years - I learned that Hans Asperger actively colluded with the Nazis by essentially signing the death warrants for several non-neurotypical children. I don't particularly care whether he was a believer in the Nazi eugenics program himself or just yet another spineless piece of crap who cooperated with what he knew was wrong. In either case, the only way he deserves to be remembered is by pissing on his grave. So I removed the word "Aspie" from my blurb and elsewhere on my site. I'm fully autistic now. I'm not sure what this means yet for the deliberately provocative title of my planned memoir Ass Burgers but I don't need to worry about that yet. On the plus side, I can take satisfaction in the fact that my existence is a living "Fick dich" to Adolf Hitler and everyone like him past and present.

Latter-day Saint - This trait is one that I chose, kind of, but it's not really much of a choice. Because I know that the Book of Mormon, the gift of the Holy Ghost, and the power of the priesthood are true, my integrity compels me to stand by those truths and affiliate with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Choosing to leave, regardless of the reasons, would require me to pretend I don't know those things are true and would be dishonest. Of course the term I originally used here and in most cases throughout my site was "Mormon" - the nickname that most people know us by and which, for some time, the Church was spending millions of dollars to promote. But a couple years ago President Russell M. Nelson announced an unprecedented institutional moratorium on said nickname and I sacrificed a great deal of my already meager Search Engine Optimization to follow the prophet. I was kind of hoping God would bless me for my obedience by increasing my site traffic anyway, which didn't happen, but whatever.

I used to have a boundless enthusiasm and grand dreams of more or less converting the world through the internet, which were kind of trampled into dust when I realized how few people actually give a crap about the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. But it remains a major part of my life and who I am and I'll keep writing about it even if I'm essentially talking to myself. Being a Latter-day Saint makes me slightly less of a jerk than I would be otherwise. It gives me a reason to keep living and hoping when everything I see in the world around me compels me toward nihilism. I have no faith in humanity. I have no faith in society. I'm confident that our species, left to its own devices, would be extinct less than two centuries from now. Placing my faith and basic human need for a larger cause and higher purpose in some cheap secular alternative and pretending it was adequate would be laughable.

It's a frequent source of frustration that I still haven't figured out how to simultaneously cater to members of the Church and those who know little about it. I want to discuss the intricacies of history and culture and apologetics and philosophy and whatever, not re-explain the most basic stuff I've been hearing since I was five. And doing the latter as a hasty introduction to the former just feels lazy and inadequate. Nowadays I more or less operate on the assumption that both of the people reading any given post are Latter-day Saints or at least former Latter-day Saints. If I were Catholic or something similarly entrenched in the popular consciousness, I wouldn't have this problem. Hmmm...

Author - I write stuff, so that technically makes me an author even though I haven't yet published anything except one reused blog post in "Magnets and Ladders". In addition to weekly posts, I've put a bunch of the stuff that I've written over the years up on my site where it's consistently gotten not much attention at all. I have to wonder what I'm doing wrong when scores of people, friends as well as teachers and professors from third grade on up, have praised my writing and made it known to me over and over that I have exceptional skill, and then I upload it to share with the world and the world ignores it. I had hoped that by the time I get around to actually publishing books for money, I would have a substantial online following and I could tell them "Hey, I'm publishing books for money and you should buy them" and they would, but by now it's obvious that strategy isn't going to work out. So whatever. *hums Jordin Sparks' "One Step at a Time" to myself until I feel better*

Child of God - I added this after President Dallin H. Oaks said in General Conference last year, "Most important, each of us is a child of God with a potential destiny of eternal life. Every other label, even including occupation, race, physical characteristics, or honors, is temporary or trivial in eternal terms. Don’t choose to label yourselves or think of yourselves in terms that put a limit on a goal for which you might strive." This is a legitimate caution and similar to the concern my parents expressed. (It's not that I disagreed with them about the danger of labels so much as whether it applied with the way I was/am using mine.)

Of course, President Oaks would surely acknowledge that labels are a necessary evil for human beings to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. In God's eyes my autism may indeed be trivial, but in my current mortal state it's the exact opposite of that. So I use the label and I won't apologize for it. I imagine in the next world the label will vanish while the benefits remain. I regard the majority of people who get to decide how the world works as fake, shallow and stupid (no offense), and I'll have some choice words for God if he decides to "fix" my brain to match theirs. But I digress. I added "Child of God" to my blurb to balance out the other labels. In my church we also use the more specific terms "daughters of God" (which in practice, thanks to our chronic putting of women on pedestals, is often shorthand for "perfect angels who can do no wrong") and "sons of God", but of course this latter runs the risk of being confused with "the Son of God", and that would definitely be the case with the capitalization in my blurb so I didn't use it.

Pretty Okay Guy - I don't expect that anyone has ever gotten this reference. If you have, congratulations, you're a cultured genius. It's actually a mashup of two quotes. One from Strong Bad narrating a flashback about himself in Strong Bad Email #100: "Everyone loves Strong Bad. He is an okay guy."

And the other from the song "So They Say" in "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog":

This is perfect for me
So they say
I guess he's pretty okay
After years of stormy
Sailing have I finally found the bay?

I like this statement because it's so obviously tongue-in-cheek, yet legitimately self-affirming, yet too modest in scope to be boastful (which I also find more amusing now in juxtaposition with "Child of God"). I do think I'm a pretty okay guy. I make no claims to be a great guy. If anyone wants to think I am, they're welcome to, but I haven't set the bar that high for myself. "Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger, and not thine own lips." (Proverbs 27:2) I just think I've done as well with the crap I've been given in life as anyone could but, and this will come as no real shock to anyone who's read many of my posts, I have plenty of room for improvement. It's a good thing I'm still young and have plenty of time for said improvement unless I get hit by a truck or something.