Cravings

Books. Where have all the good ones gone?

Rubix Cube: The Cake. 'Nuff said.

Now that's a baby blanket I can handle being seen with


My brain still hasn't figured out that I'm not going to class this semester. I miss classes.

Technically complies with my recent decision to buy more vests, but allows me to wear as a sweater, though I'm not particularly fond of the bobbles on the front

Back from Hiatus

So, eh, it's been a long time. If my artistic expression weren't above it, I would now insert one of those anime-looking smilie faces with a nervous sweat drop coming off its face. Anyway, I apologize for being gone so long. I've been undergoing a whole bunch of life-altering changes. The ironic part about life-altering changes is that they make great material to write about, but when you are actually going through them, it's very difficult to do so. A synopsis of what has happened since I last blogged (August 1):


The Wedding
I got married. I suppose this is obvious, but I thought I'd include a few obligatory wedding pictures, all courtesy of Marisa's facebook since I don't have the candids from my parents with me and the photographer ones are all watermarked. George and I coming out of the temple. I love my dress (from Bridal Image, my aunt and grandma's bridal store in Bountiful).

My baby brother Josh (8) carrying my veil--the veil's my mom's.

Obligatory reflecting pool pictures. Note the awesome gloves and George's brown tux.

Me smearing George's face with some frosting after my cousin Barb specifically told us not to. :D This is at the reception in our backyard.

And yes, married life is great. But I see no point in writing about it since the single people will just be annoyed and hopefully the married ones already know.

And now I know I definitely disagree with Ben.


No More Double Major
I come back from my honeymoon one week late to the new fall semester at BYU and discover that physical chemistry is not really a chemistry class--it's a physics class in disguise! I passed the math class on which it is based with a C+ last fall. I hate physics with a passion because it's one of the few subjects that I have to work at. I proceed to stress out and have various mental breakdowns about my adequacy. George holds up admirably. I decide to quit the chemistry major and declare a minor instead. I am now trying to pick up the shattered pieces of my identity. Don't worry, I'll get over being a normal single-major-with-minor person like the rest of you. It'll just take time.


BYUAML Presidency
I'm now the president of the student chapter of the Association for Mormon Letters. I've started a BYUAML blog (of course) and a Google calendar to keep track of activities. I really enjoyed my first AML board meeting, and I'm flippin' excited about the Writing Conference on November 10th. Yay! I'm really interested in all the activities we've got going on, so I think it's going to be fun.


Miscellaneous Other

• Working on my Honors thesis project, a collection of 4-5 personal essays on various aspects of being a Mormon woman.
• Taking the LDS lit class and trying to narrow down the subject for my research paper. I'd like to write all twenty of them, but I think one will have to suffice.
  
• Trying to find time to work on more Hugh Nibley stuff. I've been on a hiatus from working for Jack Welch and he probably wonders where I am.
• Learning not to agree to do every project that comes along just because it would be so much fun. I have to have time to see my husband too.

So, I really will try to blog something real tomorrow, and it has to do with either 1 Cor 14 or D&C 93. Or maybe I'll actually post on Blogger of Jared, since I've been a guest blogger since April and written exactly nothing.

A Simple Solution

You are a soon-to-be-married geek couple at BYU who just decided to move your wedding from December 28 to August 30. In your high-speed search for married housing, you:

A) create a spreadsheet from BYU's inadequate family housing search, eliminate entries that are too expensive or too late, then proceed to rank other information such as distance from campus and furnishing, sorting the spreadsheet to your heart's content;
B) make a Google map of the locations of the housing you are considering and color the icons to show which are near and far from campus;
C) write a program to automatically generate emails to the owners on your spreadsheet, letting them know of your interest in the property;
D) all of the above and now you can't stop giggling about how much fun it was.

Paper Scraps

My fortune cookie from PF Chang's:
Your troubles will cease and fortune will smile upon you.
(Please let this mean that finals are not going to kill me.)

*****

Officially the best line from general conference:
"It is by words that every being works when he works by faith." - Elder Jeffery R. Holland
(Ha!)

*****

From the AML Conference schedule:
3:40–5:00
Mormon Rhetoric
(402)
Katherine Morris (chair)
Liz Muir, “Inspired Speaking:
An Overview of Early
Mormon Rhetoric”
Sarah Pearson, “‘After This
Manner Therefore Pray Ye’:
A Discourse Analysis of LDS
Prayer”
(A whole 80 minutes?! What am I going to do?)

*****

From Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets:
"Because that's what Hermione does" said Ron, shrugging. "When in doubt, go to the library."
(Good solution.)

*****

From an article on 19th century preaching rhetoric that I'm reading to expand my paper for the AML conference:

Americans were never made to write;
Their genius leads them quite another way,
It is in arts and labors they display
Themselves, like other nations bright,
Perhaps in many things a little brighter,
But then there never was a good American writer.
(I am doomed.)

Criticizing the Church: A How To Guide

One of my major irritations with the bloggernacle (the Mormon blogging community), and probably Church culture in general, is criticism of the Church. As I've blogged about before in The Problem of Perfection: Part II, I feel very torn over how we should be doing it, if at all. On the one hand, blind faith is the opposite of what the Church is about. After all, one of Brother Brigham's greatest fears, according to urban legend, is that the saints will follow their leaders down to hell. Questioning and gaining a personal testimony of each principle is an important part of what we believe. "Seek and ye shall find," and all that jazz.

But then we come up against point eleven of President Ezra Taft Benson's classic address Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet: "The learned may feel the prophet is only inspired when he agrees with them, otherwise the prophet is just giving his opinion—speaking as a man." This worries me, because this is exactly what happens in a lot of Church-critical debates, and I wonder sometimes if I myself might not be guilty. I can't think of any major incidents at the moment, but I never want to be in danger of falling over that edge.

So how can I be intellectually honest and seeking to know of myself and yet keep myself away from the danger of hearkening not unto the counsel of God?

Enter Hugh Nibley stage right. (No groaning! You know you missed him when there was no Nibleyesque musing last week.) I just finished reading his speech "Criticizing the Brethren" (available at GospeLink.com or in volume 13 of his collected works), and I've officially decided it should be required reading for every Church member, or at least everyone in the bloggernacle. Dear old Hugh's writings--mostly quotes pulled from Joseph Smith--resolve exactly the dilemma I've been having on this subject.

The Good News
So the good news is this: Hugh Nibley, Joseph Smith, and the Church want to be criticized. In spite of the apparently centralized structure of our Church, as Times and Seasons recently remarked, the LDS Church doesn't have as strict of a definition of doctrine as we think it does. And this is not mere oversight on the part of our Church leaders. They've left us room for differing beliefs on purpose, as Hugh Nibley points out with this Joseph Smith quote:

I never thought it was right to call up a man and try him because he erred in doctrine, it looks too much like methodism and not like Latter day Saintism. Methodists have creeds which a man must believe or be kicked out of their church. I want the liberty of believe as I please, it feels so good not to be tramelled. It dont prove that a man is not a good man, because he errs in doctrine.

In other words, outside of a few basic and central beliefs, the Church gives us space for a wide range of beliefs. The range of Mormonism within your typical ward--from orthodox Mormons with 13+ children to new-agey liberal Mormons--is not a temporary problem to be resolved by Book-of-Mormon- or General-Conference-bashing with your neighbor, nor something that needs to be corrected at all. It's an intentional part of the gospel, and it's not as important as we think to clearly deliniate who's right and who's wrong. Nibley relates why:

All of us believe things that aren't true, things that will be proven false in time to come. Scientists like Galileo, Newton, Heisenberg, Planck, Hawking, and Penrose all have had differing beliefs about the very nature of our existence, the most fundamental doctrines of reality. Einstein used to bring God into it. But they all respected each other and didn't damn each other for wrong ideas.

On doctrinal issues that haven't been clearly stated as true or false, we should be able to agree to disagree, to acknowledge that all our opinions are subject to further revelation. As C.S. Lewis says, we should be capable of being in doubt, of saying, "God has revealed this much, and here's what I conjecture about the rest, but I don't know."

. . . With Reservations
Having established that criticism is an essential part of the way the Church works, Hugh Nibley has some qualifications to give, which I'll briefly outline below:

1. Be humble and teachable in your criticism. "You don't know so damn much." We believe in a gospel of continual revelation, so it's likely that the whole basis for your argument could be made irrelevant by new revelation.
2. Focus your criticism on what you can control: yourself. "Search your hearts & see if you are like god." Undoubtedly, you aren't. Therefore, most of your criticism should be devoted to getting rid of the beam in your own eye, rather than your neighbor's.
   
3. Criticize with the Spirit, not with the intellect. Don't rely on your own judgement in the matter. "We frequently are so filled with prejudice, or have a beam in our own eye, that we are not capable of passing right decisions."
   
4. Don't accuse when you criticize; debate instead. "To be constructive, criticism must reach the person for whom it is meant and, of course, he must have a chance to reply--but that is discussion, not criticism."
   
5. Don't worry so much. If God is really leading the Church, then it cannot fail. "What would Jospeh Smith do about evil? He didn't worry, because God was in charge." Trust a little more.
6. Check your motivations. Often. "The critics are really just showing off." Beware of criticizing just so that you don't seem complacent. Also, beware of the "knee-jerk reaction, when upset, to blame the Brethren," or I might add, your neighbor.
   
7. Is the matter trivial? Why waste your time? "These things are of too trivial a nature to occupy the attnetion of so large a body." If it's not really important to your eternal salvation, should you really be bothering? Preach nothing save repentance, after all.
   

The end sum of these reservations is this: we should have it both ways. Criticize, seek out the truth and the deep doctrines, but keep it mostly to yourself. There can be so little certainty in any criticism that it's hardly worth sharing except in the most disinterested, philosophical or private, personal conversations. Think before you speak: are you really going to want to be held to this opinion 3 years or 10 years down the road? I'll say it again--be willing to be in doubt. Stay aware and seeking in your heart, but be wary of trusting your own imperfect judgement. And above all, rely on the Lord.

The phrase I loved most in this article was Hugh Nibley's description of the Church as "an organization made up so largely of nonconformists." My liberal readers may scoff at thinking of their "orthodox" Mormon friends as nonconformists, but that depends on your definition. I'd say all that's required to be a nonconformist is to not do things for the purpose of conforming to a norm. It means following the genuine reasoning of your heart and the feelings of your mind (another Nibley analogy). Surprisingly, this noncomformist path doesn't lead us all in the same direction. An absolutely true Church with many variable paths--who could have predicted it? But then, to go back to C.S. Lewis, if it's something we wouldn't have imagined perhaps that testifies that it is true.

That Reading List Thing

I have two quips before I hop on the bandwagon and post this list. First, where did this list come from? What is it supposed to be of? It's the most odd blend of contemporary and classic I've seen in a while. Second, there are a lot of books on this list I have no desire to read, so they shouldn't count. :D

Das Key
Books I've Read
Books I've Partially Read
Books I've Never Read
Books I Never Intend to Read

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) (unfortunately)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (J.R.R. Tolkien) (Sorry, I've tried, really I have, but Tolkien and I just don't play nice.)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (J.K. Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J.K. Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (J.K. Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J.K. Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (George Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) (unfortunately)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Scott Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J.K. Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) (I heart crazy Russians!)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolsoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Helen Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (John Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In the Skin of a Lion (Michael Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Das Totals
Books I've Read - 21
Books I've Partially Read - 6
Books I've Never Read - 73

Conclusions: Assuming the books are arranged in order of relevance, I'm happy that most of my reading falls at the top of the list. And there are quite a few of these that I do want to read, but some I've never heard of. Again, by who's authority was this list contructed?

You Might be a Busy College Student if . . .

• You're excited that you only have 30 pages left until you're done with your reading in David Copperfield . . . for last Monday.
• The entire sum of groceries you've bought in the past two weeks consists of two packets of peppermint hot chocolate and a bag of black jelly beans. (Doesn't anyone else like those?)
• You wake up in the morning and can't remember when you went to sleep.
  
• Halfway through Organic Chemistry, you try to figure out if there's some discreet way you could sneak out and just take a nap.
• You try to justify that fact that you're eating two meals at Taco Bell today because at least . . . okay, so you can't really justify that. But you do it anyway.
• There's a knot in your back from falling asleep on top of David Copperfield. Curse Dickens and his large novels.
• You're frantically searching your blog archives for some old creative writing piece that you could workshop for class today instead of trying to write something new.
• You don't know how you're going to survive next week when you have a new class for second block. No more Productive Tuesdays.
  

Predictions I Need to Make for HP7

So I'm thinking it would be sweet to do some sort of coordinated weekly Harry Potter blog challenge to count down to HP7 being released, the idea being to force us all to put our predictions down in print so that we can laugh at ourselves later when JKR totally fools us all. And to participate in the greatest event in English literature in several decades. :D

Of course, there are more than 20 weeks until it comes out, so we'll need to find a lot of topics, or start it considerably later. Anyway, so here's my brainstorm. Please comment with anything else you'd like to see me ramble on/want to ramble on yourself. I'm trying to place them in order of increasing importance, so that the most hotly contested issues are near the release date.

• Teachers - new DADA teacher? is Sluggy staying?
  
• Percy - will he ever stop being a prat?
• The Dursleys - what's their fitting end? does Dudley get a Wii or not?
  
• Sirius - do we see him again? ever?
• Weasleys - does one of them die? what about F&G's shop?
• Minor Character Bonanza - Luna? Neville? Lav-Lav?
  
• The 'Ships (general) - who gets together with whom in The Final Chapter (TFC)?
• Ron/Hermione - what happens to/between them?
• Harry/Ginny - is it Spiderman all over again? will they both be alive for TFC?
  
• Horcruxes - what are the rest of them? how the heck will Harry find them?
  
• Dumbledore - will/how will he make an appearance?
• Snape - good/evil? live/die?
• Harry - live/die? horcrux/not?
• JKR - most brilliant woman ever. (not a question.)

Who wants to play with me?

Itemized Inventory

• One (1) blue Jansport backpack
• One (1) expanding file folder, mostly empty
• One (1) $10 five subject notebook
• Two (2) copies of my poems for creative writing class
  
• One (1) Mead writing notebook for English novel class, redundant
  
• Nibley on the Timely and Timeless
• The Great Divorce (Library copy)
  
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
• Wuthering Heights
• Language as Symbolic Action (Professor Boswell's copy)
  
• One (1) personal writing notebook
• Two (2) empty tupperware from lunch
• One (1) wallet, mostly empty
  
• One (1) package of tissues
• One (1) contacts case
  
• Glasses case (empty)
  
• Various coupons and gift certificates from concerned family members
• Assorted clutter
  
• Cell phone (Cingular 2125)
  
• One (1) pair headphones for cell phone
  
• BYU ID card
  
• One (1) set of ear plugs
• Seven (7) blue Bic pens
• Five (5) assorted mechanical pencils
• Two (2) canisters of mechanical pencil lead, the wrong size for the pencils
• One (1) highlighter
• One (1) red pen
  
• Two (2) tubes of chapstick
• Not my keys

Hmm. Looks like I may not be going home this weekend. At least I have some books. :D

Thoughts--Now in Five Assorted Flavors!!

• I think everyone with a blog will agree that we all need this "Blogito, Ergo Sum" t-shirt. Clearly, the Latin plus obscure philosophy plus internet culture equals cool, right? :D
• Do they even make side-loading sheet protectors? Down with unnecessary specificity.
  
• Telling lies about reading books is bad. Maybe these people need to play a little Canon to release their shame.
• I just finished reading The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman on Tuesday. Why didn't someone tell me about this book before? (Joni, I'm looking at you!)
• Everyone should come to the BYU AML poetry reading thing tonight at 7 pm in 3215 Wilk. I know all three of the poets, and they are amazing.
  

Being Other than I Am

Like Ben, I've been thinking recently about other ethnicities I would like to be if I weren't the Scottish/English/German European mutt that I am. No seriously, I thought about it for several hours on Saturday. And the winners are:

1. Jewish - Nice minor sounding music and cool traditional dances. (Okay, so I base this on Fiddler on the Roof. So sue me.) Also, they can totally pull off being sarcastic all the time and sound humorous rather than mean or jaded. "And this I'm supposed to believe? Oi vey." Great consonant combinations as well: schmuck, schlep, schmendrick. Plus, I've officially decided it would be ten times more convenient to have the Sabbath be on Saturday. I mean, on Saturday I'm still recovering from the school/work week. By Sunday, I'm ready to go, but it's Sunday, so no working allowed. Clearly, the Sabbath should be moved to Saturday for my convenience.
2. Japanese - Probably mostly because petite with dark hair is about as far away from six-feet and blond as you can get. No, seriously, I love the aesthetics of Japanese culture. If you haven't seen Memoirs of a Geisha yet, you really ought to. There's just such a sense of appreciating beauty and simplicity in Japanese culture. Granted, all that fish would take some getting used to. (I probably also wouldn't mind being Chinese. I guess I just feel like I would fit in better as an Asian.)
   
3. Russian - Um, snow! Yay! Also, Dostoevsky, cool music, and sweet accent.
   
4. Scottish - Okay, this is sort of cheap, since I am partially Scottish. (My last name is Muir, for heaven sake.) But I'd love to be a lot more Scottish than I actually am. Again, awesome accent, lots of plaid, and those great Scottish sports . . . Kaber toss anyone? Plus, you get to be from the place the Romans were to wussy to come conquer. :D
5. Canadian - All the American-ness without actually being American, eh?
   

Insert the PC disclaimers here. Please don't hate me.

Farewell, My Friends

So, this is my final blog entry before NaNoWriMo starts. I make no guarantees about the regularity of any blog entries for the next month. I'm going to try to do a "Best Sentence of the Day" thing--which may sprout into "Worst Sentence of the Day" or perhaps "Clunkiest Dialogue of the Day." But even that may fail spectacularly. And in terms of content, the only way you will get any substance is if I get terribly frustrated and need to rant about it. So it may be in your best interests to simply ignore anything I write for the next month. Show up around December 1st for your regularly scheduled programming.

Hey, in all the time you free up from not reading my strange ramblings, maybe you can write your own novel!

Or not.

10 Reasons Why I Am INSANE for Attempting to Write a Novel this Month
10. November is the beginning of holiday season. I'm supposed to be able to spend lots of time goofing off with my family.
9. I have no plot--only a vague sketch of a basis for a fantasy world. Really vague.
8. More importantly, I have no characters. Nope. None.
7. The last time I completed a work of fiction was . . . 6th grade. For reals.
6. And that was completely derivative of Princess Bride.
5. Um, homework. Midterms. Math. Chemistry.
4. Recently, I've actually come to like nonfiction a lot better than fiction. Why in the world am I trying to fight that?
3. The type of novels I usually like involve a lot of preplanning and thought.
2. I've never written any fiction that I actually am proud of. (See #7.)
1. Really, what sane person can write a novel in a month?!?

As my favorite anime says, "she is truly doomed." Wish me luck, people! Donations of novel-friendly food (no stickies or greasies) are accepted.

Snow Happy

It SNOWED today! For most people, this is bad news. Snow means wearing coats, walking to school in wet shoes, and just plain being cold. I, on the other hand, adore snow. Snow was exactly what I needed today. I've been feeling depressed lately--turns out, snow is the perfect cure. So, in honor of this tender mercy, I give you:

25+1 reasons to like snow

1. the way snow muffles all the sounds
   
2. making snowmen (or snow dinosaurs)
3. dying the snow colors with food coloring
   
4. snow angels
5. snowball fights
   
6. sliding down hills
7. skiing!!
   
8. everything is white and clean (for a while at least)
   
9. purity
10. contemplative atmosphere
    
11. fluffy!
12. eating snow
13. catching snowflakes on your tongue
    
14. sweaters
15. scarves and hats
    
16. fireplaces
17. hot chocolate (not just for breakfast anymore)
18. cold people + warm blankets = cuddling!
    
19. Christmas songs (or at least I feel less guilty about singing them)
20. Christmas lights reflecting off the white sheets
    
21. snow means my birthday is coming!
    
22. icicles!
23. the "thawing-out" feeling after coming in from the cold
24. driving in newly fallen snow
25. doing donuts in the parking lot
26. watching the flakes melt in your hand

In other news, less than one week left until NaNoWriMo starts! Gah!

Top 10 Things I Learned while Attempting to Hike Timp Today

10-The Romantic poets were right.
9-Water bottles left at home don't quench thirst
8-Mountains are steep. Very steep.
7-I need to pick up photography again. If only I still had that camera . . . .
6-I need to memorize more poetry.
5-Why mountains are so closely tied to temples.
4-Nature can overcome anything.
3-Stop and look at the beauty around you . . . .
2-But watch for rocks.
1-Know your limits.

Top Four Rules of Social Ettiquette

. . . in other words, people who break these rules irritate me. This was going to be a top ten list, but then I realized there aren't that many things that really irritate me. This is probably a good thing.

1. Never open with "Are you busy?" when asking for a favor or date. This rule is not nearly well known enough, and whenever I am confronted by it, I just want to scream. When you begin this way, the person is left with no graceful way to back out of your request. I mean, ideally, we would always help others out and accept every date we're asked on, but there are some very valid reasons to reject either one. And, since you've already determined they aren't busy, the only other way to reject your offer is to tell you that they don't want to go out with you or help you. So unless you are trying to find out if the other person really doesn't like you, leave the back gate open by mentioning the activity first and the time later.

2. Open doors for women, but not just because they told you to. There is a certain spirit of door opening that has been lost due to the masses of males attempting to follow the letter of the door-opening law (especially in the BYU environment). The reason men are supposed to open doors for women is not because we are too delicate/weak to open them ourselves, but to show thoughtfulness and to make the evening (or morning, or afternoon) flow more easily for the woman. In essence, you are trying to keep her mind off of such mundane things as opening doors and more on you. Thus, if you insist on opening doors, do it like a butler--that is, before she realizes that you are doing it. Be there before she goes to reach for the door handle. If a woman has to wait while you amble around the car and open her door what seems like an eternity later, she's thinking more about this whole door opening thing than she is about you. If you can't get there fast enough, just let her open the door, and be more aware next time.

3. If your cell phone rings while you are with company, answer it but get off as soon as possible. Nothing is more irritating to the real people sitting next to you than being pushed aside for some immaterial voice. If they have any manners (or curiousity), it will be fairly difficult to continue with normal conversation whilst you gab away. And text messaging counts, people. Treat it exactly as you would if someone knocked on your door while you were at home with some friends. Answer the call, and let your caller know exactly where you are and what you are doing. If the call demands urgent attention, explain the situation to your company and excuse yourself. If not, ask the person to either come join the group in person or call back later.

4. If you are unsure of someone's name, ask it before you start talking. This is the only one of these rules I admit to being fairly terrible at. Case in point: one time at a ward activity, I was chatting to some guy who I happened to be next to in the line for refreshments. We kept talking and a little while later he asked me to go see a movie with him. Being new in the ward, I had no idea what the guy's name was and was thoroughly embarassed to have to look him up in the ward directory later. However much awkwardness it causes, always make sure of the person's name as soon as possible in a conversation. It will save you an infinitely greater amount of awkwardness later.

Brittany McComb: A Question of Scale

Well, I had another blog topic for tonight, but after reading about Brittany McComb on Ben's blog, I guess I'll put off that post till tomorrow. It'll make a good Sunday post anyway.

So here's the short and fast story of Brittany McComb. Brittany becomes valedictorian. She writes a valediction about how Christ and God have changed her life. The administration, fearing legal ramifications, edits out of her speech all references to Christ and scripture. Girl tries to give original speech anyway, but the microphone is cut by the administration. Legal ramifications and talk shows ensue (see link above).

Now, keep reading, because I don't think I'm going to take the side you expect. In keeping with my Circle of Knowledge theory, I can see that each side in this debate has some truth behind it, and the conclusion I've come to seems to be somewhere in the middle. Keep in mind, I am not really interested in the legal aspects behind this, but the moral ones. After all, we can only have just laws if we truly understand the morals they should be upholding.

But the relationship between law and morality is another topic for another time. Back to the subject at hand.

Two opposing experiences keep coming back to me as I think about this issue of eliminating Christ from public. First, I remember sitting in my Theory of Knowledge class in high school listening to a girl explain how her belief in chakra energies and related religious concepts had healed her life, and were really much better than western medicine. Being from Utah, my high school did have quite a large percentage of LDS students (probably 50%), but since it was part of the IB program, it had a little more of an international flavor than most. This particular class I knew contained quite a few agnostics/atheists, several Jews, and at least one Hindu and one Muslim. But despite our apparent diversity and tolerance at other times, the feeling in the classroom was extremely uneasy, and the students in the class were clearly not comfortable with what she was saying to us. But none of us were willing to say anything about it.

I still wonder why we were uncomfortable. Was it the mere action of advocating a religious view in a classroom that made us uncomfortable, or was it that the philosophy being advocated? Had it been a Christian (or more particularly LDS) student speaking about Christ and the atonement, would we--by which I mostly mean I--have felt the same way? I know I have sometimes felt uncomfortable at the way other Christian religions proselyte. But if it were my own religion being preached to a crowd of essentially captive unbelievers, who hadn't asked to hear about it, would I feel the same way? Essentially, I think the delimma boils down to this: can we, or should we, separate the act of proselyting from the beliefs being proselyted? To this, I would hope I could say yes, that I could look at the act of proselyting from an objective point of view, even if it was my own religion. But this is something you may have to convince yourself of.

Once we admit this separation, and that proselyting can cause discomfort in an audience, we can see how there is some valid point for concern over public religious expression. It boils down to the same debate of the ages: individual rights versus public security. I mean, we have laws against verbal harassment for the same sort of reason: even though it does no physical harm, it can cause discomfort in other ways. In the same way, I hate being harassed by the protestors at General Conference or at the Manti Pagent. It is extremely disconcerting, even heartbreaking, to be forced to listen to your religion be thrashed and trashed, even indirectly by those who are simply preaching other views, in a place where it is not wanted.

Which leads me to the other experience I keep thinking about. This one I didn't experience personally, but did hear from a first-hand source. A German-language teacher at my school used to occasionally have a free reading period in class as a reward after quizzes or tests. However, when some students began to read their scriptures during that time, the teacher ordered them not to do so because it violated her freedom of religion. (In the end, she was not allowed to ban specific religious texts from the period, and instead decided to do away with it all together.)

I would hope that anyone reading that story would realize that what the teacher did was completely irrational. Having someone else read a certain book in your classroom is nearly impossible to rationally construe as a violation of your rights. Clearly there is a matter of degrees here. What Brittany McComb did is not on par with what the garment-waving protestors do at General Conference. A general scale of the relationship between religious practice and the public goes something like this, from most-easily acceptable to totally unacceptable:

• private religious practice
• public religious practice
• expression of beliefs in public
• proselytising and advocating a belief system
• denigrating/descriminating against someone else's belief system

What the Brittany McComb incident represents is a confusion of this scale. Much of the civil rights movement worked hard to prevent the descrimination aspect of this scale, which I hope every rational person could agree is the right thing to do. And the Bill of Rights clearly protects the first two, the right to religious freedom. But what to do with these middle two is the problem.

I firmly believe that we do not live in a society that wants to eliminate expression of beliefs and proselytising all together. There may be some extremists who actually do believe that, but being an eternal optimist, I must believe that the majority are fairly reasonable people such as myself. The thing is that these reasonable people have noticed, as I have, that religious speech is a delicate issue, that at some times it is appropriate to voice belief and at others it is not. Even Christ said, "neither cast ye your pearls before swine" (Matt. 7:6), which I take to mean that we don't need to proselyte in every conversation (which bothers me to no end about some evangelicals), but we should instead reserve our expression to appropriate moments and audiences.

So in the end, after reading the full text of Brittany McComb's speech, I must agree with the school's decision to edit her speech. I disagree with the idea that there is no place for Christ in a graduation speech, but I think that the way she did so was not appropriate. Her speech focuses on her conversion to Christianity rather than her school experience. Her talk might actually fit in at an LDS testimony meeting, but not a graduation. Had she done as she claimed to have done and simply cited her religion as one of the influential factors in her life, in a quiet statement of belief rather than proselytizing, then the school board might have been in the wrong (morally, though perhaps not legally).

(However, after that, I must add that I do agree that this suppression of religion movement is targeted towards Christians. Notice in my two experiences that although there was discomfort in both, action was only taken in the situation involving a Christian religion. I however do not believe this to be due to a particular hatred of Christianity. Rather, it is due to two factors. First, other religions still fall under the protection of our fear of being accused of discrimination. We fear that our actions to preserve our own comfort will be miscontrued as racism or beliefism. Witness how the media deals with Islamic extremism--overly careful to make sure that the audience knows they are not against the religion, but merely some of its expressions. The second factor is simply the nature of Christianity. We are a missionary religion, and therefore we feel the need to speak about our beliefs more, which in turn gives us more opportunities to speak out in the wrong times and wrong places. Again, there may be some who do discriminate against Christianity, but not a majority, by far.)