Wrapping up oh nine

This picture was sent in by marriedtoamoho. Quite possibly the best part about this picture is that when she emailed it to me, she forgot to attach the picture and the only thing in the body of the email was the word “ASS”. This was shortly after becoming friends on Facebook and so I thought maybe she was calling me an ass and this meant that she didn’t want to be friends after all. Fortunately, a second email came (ASS II) and it had the above picture attached. It reminds me of the Mom Jeans commercial on SNL. I should do that wordle thing again after I post this to see if ASS is the biggest word on there. ASS.

I made it back from SLC. I flew in this morning and it feels good to be back. I wish I could express how much I love Portland. Part of that is due to the fact that I can already start to feel the inside of my nose healing after the cold dryness of SLC. (No, Ninny, I wasn’t doing crack in Utah) For those of you I didn’t get to see, I’m sorry. You know how the holidays go. My love for you will always burn (name that song/movie, it was one of my favorites growing up).

This is probably my last post of oh nine. I’m looking forward to 10. I’ve got some exciting things already in the works. I'll keep you posted. Peace out, suckas!

Just some thoughts

I’m still in the SLC. Today I had multiple experiences that have thinking about some things. I’ll start with the last experience. I read this post by John over at Young Stranger. I discovered John’s blog several weeks back when I read a guest post he did at Mormon Matters. The post on his blog that I read today is an exploration and questioning of why gay mormon men who are in gay relationships or are open to gay relationships completely remove themselves from the church. There are not many people in gay relationships who attend church. I don’t really want to explore the reasons for that in this post other than to say that it kind of contributed to stuff I was thinking about today. Plus, I think it gives some context for what follows below, so it would probably be a good idea to read it.

Another experience from today. I met a childhood friend and her family for breakfast this morning. She’s known me longer than anyone except for my parents. She was born two months after me and her family lived up the street. Our mothers did preschool for just the two of us. She feels like family in a lot of ways to me. She married an incredibly great guy, who I admire a lot. We were talking about lots of things and I said something about how I feel like one of the reasons I’m still active is because of the ward I’m currently in. There is a lot of diversity of thought and I’m able to be open about my sexuality and it’s not a huge deal. I feel like it adds to my overall well being and I love being a part of my ward.

Since the ward I attend is a young single adult ward, I obviously can’t attend it forever. Nor would I necessarily want to. I’ve thought a lot about how things will change when I move on to a family ward. I’ve created a unique situation for myself where I’m able to be open and my ward is loving and supportive of my situation. Part of me thinks that’s because it’s all a bunch of twenty-somethings. Ahem, with a few exceptions. :) These people have had gay friends or known gay friends at school. There are also a lot of people in my ward who don’t fit the typical mormon mold. I feel very comfortable and at home.

I think a family ward is going to be different. Generally speaking more cookie cutter people. Older people who haven’t ever personally known any openly homosexual people. People who are set in their ways and their ways of thinking. Most of my life I’ve been a conformist. I wonder how I will handle it when I make the transition. I’m to the point where I could no longer go back and be quiet about things and pretend not to feel the way I do to appease others. I’ve started blazing a trail for myself in the singles ward that works well for me and I think it will be more difficult to continue that trail in a family ward.

That’s all. Just things I’ve been thinking about while I’m in the SLC.

Christmas POW! #9

I made it to the SLC. I love that every time I fly to or from SLC I am on a flight with someone I know. It's a small Mormon world. So this very special Christmas POW! is brought to you by a lady at work. Well, I took the pictures, but she provides the kodak moment. Every year, during the weekend of Thanksgiving, she and her husband come in and decorate the department for Christmas. They haul in many large tubs of Christmas decorations of every variety. Porcelain villages, nativities, stuffed animals, garland, fake snow, nutcrackers, miniature Christmas trees. Anything and everything you can possibly imagine. Then they cover every open space on the tops of filing cabinets with it. The result looks like Christmas came in and hoarked everywhere. This picture is to give you a feel of the layout. This is just one of the filing cabinet spaces where Christmas tossed its cookies.




Here's what kind of looks like it should be a stable for a manger scene, but instead there's a carousel horse. It's hard to see in this picture, but the horse is impaled by a Christmas tree. Over to the right you can see some carolers by a streetlight. And a cow. NBD.

Here we have Mr. and Mrs. Claus. I swear she stole those two from my Grandma's house. Someone in my family back me up here. Didn't grandma have the exact same thing? As a matter of fact, my brother's family now lives in my grandma's house. Maybe these two came with the house?

Here are two nutcracker guys standing gaurd under some hot air balloon. When it's turned on it makes music and rotates. There are other moving pieces to her display and lights too. I heard a rumor that when she was gone for a couple of days she trained someone on how to start everything up in the morning and shut it down at night. This is real, you guys. Christmas is no joke.

And probably one of my favorite pieces is Santa. On a Harley. I think he rocks back and forth and sings Born to be Wild or something like that.

It's always funny when we have visitors on the floor and they see the spread. Some of them don't quite know how to react. Here's another entertaining tidbit. Last year after they came and decorated the floor, I had a dream that this woman and her husband had us all over to their house for a holiday party and her husband clipped my toenails. I think that came from a rumor I've heard that her husband cuts and colors her hair and even does it for her every morning. I imagine her husband to be Harvey Fierstein.

Merry Christmas!!!!

I got married this weekend!!

Well, I pretended to get married. I can’t tell you how ecstatic my bishop would be if I actually had gotten married. A friend of mine has a design blog called frolic! It was named in a London Times article as one of 50 of the world’s best design blogs. It’s no wonder. Did you click on the link? Adorable.

She recently did an article for Project Wedding about a simple, at home wedding during the holidays and asked me to play the part of the groom for the pictures that accompanied the article. As you can see, the bride was lovely. Too bad she has a boyfriend. And I’m gay. Otherwise, I’m sure we would make a magical couple.

The house that we did the shoot at was incredibly charming and cozy, as you can see in the pictures. I also thoroughly enjoyed watching someone so creative and talented at work. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a honeymoon to go on…

Let's be big

By size I mean the stature of [your] soul, the range and depth of [your] love, [your] capacity for relationships. I mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality, the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure. I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness. I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions. I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature.

-Bernard Loomer

Spoiler Alert!!!

Last night I had a dream that I was hanging out with the cast of Brothers & Sisters. Not the whole cast though, it was only Sally Field and the girl who plays Justin’s fiancé. (Or should I say wife???? We don’t know because Kitty passed out dramatically at the end of the last episode in the middle of their ceremony!!!) Anyway, one of the male characters was also there, but I can’t remember who. I think it was either Justin or Kevin. All I remember is that we were hanging out on the set and laughing. I think maybe I was making a guest appearance and we were in between scenes. That’s how it is in the biz, sometimes you’re just waiting between scenes, joking around on the set.

On my way to work I saw a superhero car. It had all sorts of large, almost life size, decals all over it of various superheroes, like Captain America and Flash and so on. On the back of it, where you would normally see the VW or the Toyota symbol, it had a fancy looking metallic superman symbol. The license plate said “Kal-El”. It would have made for a good POW! picture if I had been able to get my phone out fast enough.

Speaking of good POW! pictures, when my sister and I were at the coast, we saw a dog with two broken hind legs. It was in some sort of doggie wheelchair with its back half hoisted onto some kind of contraption with two wheels. Weird. I wanted to take a picture, but the owner was right there and thought that wouldn’t be very nice.

Speaking of bad times to take a good POW! Courtney told me that once she went to breakfast and there was a lady there who didn’t have any arms and was eating with her feet. She wanted to take a picture, but refrained. See how classy my friends are? Maybe I should also have a DOPOW! where you submit a description of a picture that you felt too uncomfortable to take.

You might think I have a vendetta against Sarah Palin. I would call it more of a fascination with her (and not the kind where I scour the internet to find pictures of her in a bikini). Did you hear about this? Really Sarah Palin? You’re wearing a visor from your failed campaign in 2008 that you probably handed out for free to people at town halls? AND you scribbled out McCain’s name in black MARKER? Really? Can you not afford to go out and just BUY a new visor? You could probably get one for cheap at a dollar store. Seth Meyers, if you are reading my blog, you can use this on Weekend Update.

I’m looking at flights to go to Hong Kong to visit my sister and her family. It’s weird to say that she has a family because she’s my little sister, but she has a husband and two kids, so they are totally legit. The cheapest ticket is on Korean Air. I remembered, however, that I read about Korean Air in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

Korean Air once had a disturbing record of crashes, attributable not to poor maintenance or any incompetence on the part of Korean pilots but to cultural practices of deference and linguistic indirection -- that is, it's up to the listener to figure out the speaker's meaning in Korean, while in English it's the speaker's duty to make himself clear. This was a deadly trait in the cockpit, when co-pilots were unable to bring themselves to tell the captain, "Sir, we're about to hit that mountain."

This ended up being about a lot more than just my guest appearance on B&S.

Going Rogue, Moho Style

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this on my blog, but I am the ward mission leader in my ward. This was a very difficult calling for me to accept. It took some negotiating and convincing before I accepted. I don’t really like the church’s approach to missionary work. I think it’s too corporate. I’ve been to way too many training meetings with PowerPoint presentations and flow charts and numbers and graphs. Sometimes I feel more like I am in a sales training meeting, and I guess I kind of am, but it feels so gross to me. Also, I’m pretty laid back when it comes to missionary work. If they are really interested, they’ll come to me. If not, meh, who cares? I also, at times, find it hard to go to bat (yup, sports analogy) for an organization that I feel hasn’t always gone to bat for me.

Normally, my modus operandi (a sports analogy AND a little latin, where else are you going to get that?) is to accept without question and mindlessly conform. I can’t do that anymore. That’s why it took some negotiating and convincing. I laid my concerns out for my bishop and he said he had no problem and still felt like the calling was for me. I figured as long as he knew where I was coming from and we had an understanding, I could feel ok about accepting the calling. The experience has been one of doing things or not doing things in a way that I feel comfortable with. In a way that I feel is true to who I am. And while doing that, feeling ok about it.

We recently got sister missionaries in our ward. They are kind of intense but have good intentions. We met for the first time on Sunday and Ariel (rockstar ward missionary) was there. They told me about a girl they are teaching who had some doubts/questions. Ariel elaborated that those doubts included the role of women in the church and the church’s stance on homosexuality. Ariel and I exchanged smiles and afterwards she and I talked. We decided to visit the young lady and did so last night.

Before doing that, however, I had tithing settlement. I told the bishop about the girl who the missionaries are teaching and told him that Ariel and I were going to go visit her and discuss some of her concerns. I warned the bishop that this would probably include telling the girl about my own homosexuality. I also said I wouldn’t sugar coat things. There are lots of things about the church’s approach or lack of approach to homosexuality that don’t sit well with me and I wouldn’t pretend that I felt differently. I would, however, share my testimony about why I still choose to affiliate myself with the church and why, at the end of the day, I still love it.

My bishop is a good man. His first concern was whether or not this would put me in an uncomfortable position. The only other thing he asked was that I be prayerful about the whole thing. I think one of the best things I’ve learned from all of this is the importance of going through the process of wrestling, whether it’s with a church calling or relationship or project or whatever. Instead of automatically walking away or conforming, find that third option. Figure out how you can be true to who you are and what you believe and bring your own experience to enrich that calling or relationship or whatever you might be wrestling with. It will help you learn more about who you are and what you believe and will bring fresh air to that calling or relationship.

I was hesitant to accept the calling and my feelings about it have been up and down, but right now I feel good about what I’ve been able to do and that I haven’t been a typical ward mission leader (not that there’s anything wrong with that). How many ward mission leaders go to Sunstone symposiums with recent converts or talk frankly to potential converts about homosexuality. BOO-yeah.

Happy Hanukkah!

Every year for Christmas, we go out to breakfast as a department at work and have an ornament exchange. It’s like a white elephant exchange but with Christmas ornaments. I know. Lame. This morning was the annual exchange and fortunately, lots of people went rogue and brought more useful things to exchange like a Starbucks gift card or a bottle of wine or a six pack of Christmas beer. Well, useful for some people anyway. I, of course, ended up with the lamest 5 pack of Christmas balls ever. My coworker tried to help me look on the bright side and told me that I could unpackage the 5 balls and have an ornament to exchange for the next five years.

Last night I was debating what to bring for my ornament as I still hadn’t figured anything out. I had the idea of making a star out of popsicle sticks and then putting my face in the middle, like you make in elementary school for your mother. I even went so far as eating and melting a bunch of popsicles in my freezer for the sticks. I glued them together to make a star (pictured above), but this morning I ended up chickening out. It kind of looked like a star of David and I thought that might be offensive to some people if I brought a star of David made of stained red popsicle sticks with my face in the middle. Not that my face is offensive, but you know.

Instead, I stopped at Albertson’s on the way to work to pick something up. They only had a few tacky ornaments on hand. I had my choice between Spongebob, Transformers and Stewie from Family Guy. I was in a bit of a pinch so I just went with Stewie. We got to the restaurant and I sat at a table with coworkers D and M. When my ornament was chosen from the pile and unwrapped, M said, “Oh great, I better not end up with that one,” which he never should have said. That was the ornament he ended up with and the whole time he was complaining and saying how much he hated it. Pretty soon D joined in and then later said, “We better be careful, we might be offending Jon.” He said this jokingly and then asked which ornament I brought. I pointed at Stewie and said, “that one.”

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I’m not even sure where to begin. It seems like I haven’t posted anything forever, but it hasn’t even been a week. My sister flew in Thursday morning and I took Thursday and Friday off work. We drove out to Cannon Beach after she flew in and spent the afternoon walking on the beach and eating lunch at the Wayfarer. We shared a burger and a salad and got this crazy good berry cobbler. The weather was surprisingly good. It had been freezing in Portland, and I thought it would be horrible at the coast with the wind, but it was surprisingly calm and not all that cold. We drove back to Portland and I got back in time to go to my dress rehearsal for the concert.

Friday morning we took it easy and lay (is that the correct usage? I always have a hard time with lie and lay) around and had some great conversation and then decided to go to the gym so that we could then feel ok about going to Grilled Cheese Grill for lunch. I got the Hot Brie. I am in love with brie. I have to go back and try the Jalapeno Popper though. It comes recommended by a lady who knows and it sounded so good.

Friday night was the concert and it went well. I almost fell down the stairs as I was leaving the stage for intermission, but fortunately I was able to regain my balance quickly. My favorite part was when the choir took breaks and we got to listen to the solos and duets and other small group numbers. There are some insanely talented people in the choir and I wondered more than once how I got in.

Yesterday was our ward Christmas program. Favorite moment of the day was when this girl was giving her talk and listing off familiar Christmas things and what they symbolize (candy canes and the shepherd’s crook, etc.) She got to “a wreath” and Ariel and I both started to snicker and turned to each other and said, “Aretha Franklin!” I’m not sure what she symbolizes, but then I remembered her and her hat that she wore at Obama’s inauguration.

Last night my friend Jarrett came over and we watched the finale of Glee. Favorite line: She’s the one they made me talk to when they found a dead bird in my locker.

Cigarette POW! #8

I decided to do an early POW! because the end of the week is going to be busy. This edition is cigarette themed! Weee!!! So this first picture comes once again from Desha and was taken in the Izmir, Turkey International Airport. Apparently, you can buy your cigs in bulk over there. If you want Desha to pick you up a couple of pallets, you're too late. She's already back in America. Plus, smoking kills.

If the whole smoking kills thing is new to you, and you are now wondering what to do with all the thousands of packages of cigarettes that you have at home. Here's an idea sent in from MNJ in TN. Cigarette art!!! Double weee!!! Apparently, this is a 5' by 5' picture woven from 5,782 packs of cigarettes. That's a whole lot of lung cancer turned into beautiful wall art for your home.

My concert is on Friday night. If you are in or around Portland and still haven't bought a ticket and want to, send me an email and I will get you the deets. Whoever sells the most tickets gets two nights in a condo on the coast!

What I was up to this weekend...

Friday night I went and saw Portland Cello Project’s Holiday concert at the Aladdin. It wasn’t quite as high energy as the show that I went to at the Doug Fir in August, but it was fun. It was ugly Christmas sweater themed (those types of parties seem to be all the rage these days), and I wore the above pictured sweatshirt. Please notice that the snowman is winking. Also, please note that even though the way my sweatshirt is bunching makes it looks like I have breasts, I don’t. (Wouldn’t that be the ultimate twist if I suddenly revealed myself as a large breasted woman!)

The fun part of the evening was looking around and trying to decide who was actually serious about their sweater. We had a hard time determining how serious the woman near us was who was wearing a tree skirt as a poncho.

My cold was lingering yesterday and so I decided not to go to church. I have to admit I was a little bit disappointed when I heard that the power went out and they ended up only having sacrament meeting anyway.

BTW, I’m still meditating. Not every day, but often. I haven’t had any really profound experience so far, but it’s a nice way to center myself before starting the day.

I also have a confession to make. All this time I’ve been leading you on and letting you believe that I have a Snuggie. I actually have a knock-off, and it’s called a Snuzzle. There, I feel much lighter now. I’m actually considering wearing it to work tomorrow, because it’s FREEZING.

Cell Phone POW! #7

This POW! comes from my friend Desha, who has been hanging out in Turkey and Greece for the last month. She said she found it on a beach on Hydra Island in Greece. I wonder what the masculine state is like. Would it be a fun place to visit? Probably not, I’m guessing there would be lots of Stuart Scott and SportsCenter.

Last night the choir I sing in sang at The Grotto. Every year during December they do a Festival of Lights. Think Temple Square, only Catholic. We sang in a small chapel there and the acoustics were fantastic. I was a little surprised at how good we sounded. The bad part though, is that anytime I had to flip into falsetto nothing would come out. The thought crossed my mind that I hoped I wasn’t getting sick. Sure enough, I woke up with a sore throat. I hope it passes quickly. We are performing again tomorrow night and our big concert is a week from today. In the meantime, I just want to cuddle up with my Snuggie and watch Glee.

I’m a floor warden at work. No, I don’t work in a prison, I’m just supposed to respond in case of an emergency. This morning I had to go to a two hour fire extinguisher training. The first hour included an incredibly lame video and a power point presentation. Although, this video was kind of cool. They certainly didn’t need to take 2 hours though. I thought the second hour was going to be a lot more fun because they told us we would get to do some “hands on” training. I took this to mean that we would use real extinguishers to put out real fires. This is what we did instead. Total let down.

We each got a turn with the BullEx Bullseye, and the guy doing the training was taking it way too seriously. He was coaching all of us like we were his little league baseball team. I stepped up to the extinguisher and he gives me the “C’mon, you can do this!” After I started extinguishing the fire he said, “C’mon, you gotta want this!” I almost stopped and let the fire rage so that I could turn to him and say, “Dude, I’m fighting a fake fire with a pretend extinguisher.”

Coming soon: a cigarette and a Christmas themed POW! (Those are two separate themes.)

Uncircling the wagons

We all have defensive strategies. Some of them were developed when we were young, as a way to cope with things we didn’t understand or were unable to process in mature and healthy ways. As we get older, however, those coping mechanisms outlive their usefulness and actually serve to hold us back. Case in point: when I was younger I was very uncomfortable around grown men. Actually pretty much any male, unless he was 10 or younger. At some point as a child I decided to just not interact with men. For many reasons (some known and I’m sure others not known) I decided there was too much risk emotionally. Not that I thought about it in those terms when I was little, but that’s how I see it looking back.

Obviously, that type of defensive strategy isn’t sustainable, given that roughly half the world’s population is male. As it turns out, if you want to lead any semblance of a happy healthy life, you need to learn how to relate to men. At some point I abandoned that train of thought and started to trust. This isn’t about me though.

I think the church developed a defensive strategy in its infancy that has long outlived its usefulness. I think the church has a persecution complex and as a result tends to circle the wagons a bit too much. The wagon circling began back in the early days of the church out of necessity. Back then it was a more literal circling of the wagons, but I think we still hold on to that in a more figurative sense. I think as a church we sometimes circle the wagons against anything unfamiliar to different from us.

One case in point is a post by Abelard Enigma. As far as I can tell, Abe is like the godfather of online Mormon homosexuals. You can put that on your resume, Abe. The story of the young man in his post is played out all the time. The story of people on the fringes who don’t fit the mold and have a hell of a time finding reasons to stay in the church. I don’t think members purposefully try to exclude those on the periphery. I think it’s just kind of an almost instinctual reaction that occurs as a result of decades and decades of cultural inbreeding. Words like “peculiar people” are worn as a badge of honor, but I think those words have taken on a different meaning than what was originally intended. I think in some ways it’s become more of an excuse for social awkwardness or feeling like we don’t fit in. I’m pretty sure there’s a better way of being a peculiar people than by being so socially isolated that we are only able to relate to those who share our own religious beliefs.

Another case in point: The church issued a pamphlet a couple of years ago called God Loveth His Children, which specifically addresses same sex attraction. The following counsel is given: “it is not helpful to flaunt homosexual tendencies or make them the subject of unnecessary observation or discussion. It is better to choose as friends those who do not publicly display their homosexual feelings.” I’m not even really sure what the first part means. Should I not be blogging about it? To me it has the feeling “it’s ok if you feel this way, but please try to pretend not to.” As far as the second sentence goes, it would probably be better for you if we weren’t friends because I am fairly public about my homosexual feelings. Is that what it means?

I guess my point is, I think we’re a lot more scared of homosexuality than we need to be. Sure, there are some homosexuals out there who flaunt and display in disgusting ways and with whom it would probably be better not to identify yourself with or look to for guidance as you try and figure out what it means feel the way you do, but there are also members of the church at the other end of the spectrum with whom it would also not be a good idea to identify with. I think each extreme can be destructive in its own special way.

I don’t think we are the small, persecuted church that we once were. The strategy of circling the wagons against those not like us has outlived its usefulness and I think actually holds us back. I think we can afford to be more expansive and inclusive without destroying the core doctrine of the church. Another thing I’ve discovered is that as someone on the fringe, I don’t have to shave off my corners to fit in the round hole. On the contrary, I have the opportunity to explore what great things the fringe has to offer and bring it back to share with the mainstream.

A birthday and Grilled Cheese Grill

This weekend I went to a birthday party for Ginger, who is a lady. She likes to remind me of this and it makes me smile every time. I don’t know who made what, but there was lots of deliciousness at this party. Little round pieces of goat cheese with spices on top. Asparagus in a blanket (like pigs in a blanket but asparagus). Bacon wrapped figs. I’ve never really been a fan of figs, but once again, we learn that bacon makes everything better. There were these yummy crunchy flakey pastry thingies that I think her roommate Alisa made. Alisa is a chef and I love it when they invite me over for dinner. She also made the birthday cake, which was a beautiful chocolate layered cake that included a thin layer of persimmon, with dried persimmon on top. That was my first experience with that fruit and it was delicious. Although I’m pretty sure you could have put a thin layer of just about anything in that cake and it still would have been heavenly. Okay, enough food porn.

We also played pin the fangs on Edward and I did a pretty good job, but Sheri beat me. Toward the end, Ginger gave us all party favor gift bags with confetti and whistles and sunglasses and temporary tattoos and little plastic dinosaurs. We also ate on paper plates with Black Beauty on them. Like I said, Ginger is a lady.

Last night I went to dinner with my home teachers and they also invited their other home teachees. We went to Café Vita, which was pretty good. I got a spicy salmon burger. Afterwards, some of us went to a food cart called Grilled Cheese Grill. They make various and assorted kinds of grilled cheese sandwiches. Check out their menu. Delicious. I shared a dessert sandwich with Stina. Cinnamon swirl bread with bananas, nutella and mascarpone. Sweet mother. Look at me, back to food porn.

Next to the food cart is a giant school bus that you can eat on and the table tops have collages of old school, school pictures and there was some crazy fun dance music playing as well and trivial pursuit cards on the table in case conversation is slow. This is why I love Portland. If you come visit me, I will take you there.

Yesterday I ate a dove chocolate from my coworkers desk and this is the message that was inside: Keep believing in yourself and your special dreams. Why’d it have to go and call my dreams special?

Also, I may or may not have worked out at the gym last night to the soundtrack of Confessions of a Shopaholic before dinner.

Cell Phone POW! #6

There has been no spinoff yet. Here, however, is a fantastic pic sent in by Andy, who snapped this of a sign in the building at BYU where he works. I'm thinking BYU printing services should invest in a token dirty minded employee that can help them know that signs with words like penetration can be taken other ways. Maybe though, BYU printing services is run by someone with a sense of humor.

Thanksgiving was fantastic. It started with a delicious breakfast with a good friend and ended with The Blind Side, a movie that I thought was set in the early 90's because of how Sandra Bullock looks in it. It was actually set I think around 2000-2003? I made more sense when I realized that the movie took place in TN. No offense to my friends in TN, you two are nothing but class! Sandra's hair was horrible though. So was her wardrobe. I may have cried a little bit in the movie though.

In between the bookends of my day, I volunteered at a church in Portland and had dinner with my friend Diana and her family and it was d to the licious. Diana is the friend who invited a group of us down to press cider. There were no didgeridoos, but her dad did make the most delicious apple pie ever. Of course.

I'm thankful for NPR and Adam

This morning I was listening to NPR on the way to work, something I haven’t done in a while. I go through phases of regularly listening to NPR. It all started the summer after I got home from my mission. I got home in December and my friend Adam got home that spring. We both worked at the same small office in SLC for the summer and during that time, Adam discovered NPR and immediately fell in love. He listened to it while he worked. It fed his curiosity and desire to know more about everything.

After work during the ride home, he would go on about what he’d heard that day. I’m afraid I wasn’t much of a carpooling companion, conversation-wise, back then. I listened and rarely had anything of substance to contribute. I was a smart kid and did well in school but it was mostly the kind of smart where you memorize facts and regurgitate them. I was really good at that. Adam, however, was fiercely intellectually curious.

That summer started something for me though. Sometimes I’d go home and look stuff up that Adam had been talking about. At the time, a lot of it had to do with the lead-up to the 2000 election. Looking back, it probably would have been the summer before the presidential primaries. After that summer, we lived together at BYU and I was able to continue witnessing Adam’s fierceness. As a side note, Adam was also the first person I came out to outside of my immediate family.

The following summer (or maybe the summer after) I worked driving an airport shuttle for a hotel in downtown SLC. This meant that I was in a minivan driving between the hotel and the airport all day long. I decided to start listening to NPR to help pass the time. And I listened from 6:00 am to 3:30 in the afternoon. Every single day. It didn’t take long for me to get hooked. NPR became my crack cocaine. I’d get my fill on the day’s news with Morning Edition. Then I’d listen to the Diane Rehm show and I loved her. I’d also listen to Doug Fabrizio’s beautiful voice on Radio West. Juan Williams on Talk of the Nation. Ira Flato on Science Friday.

Needless to say it ignited a fire of intellectual curiosity. I was also meeting interesting people every day on the shuttle. I think that summer was also the first time I heard of Sunstone. At that point though, I thought it was interesting, but something to be steered clear of. Anyway, that was the summer when I began to engage in the world around me instead of remaining in my own bubble.

The story this morning on NPR was about ants. Some guy is studying them because he thinks they can count. He says they have internal pedometers and that’s how they are able to find their way back home after venturing out for food. Instead of explaining his experiment for how he tested this, check out the story at NPR. My question is how and who chops off the legs of the ants at the knees for the one group of ants, and how and who superglued pre-cut pig bristles as leg extensions to the other group of ants. If you didn’t read the NPR article, I bet you want to now.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Month of Meditation

A couple of weeks ago I posted a link to an article called Mormon Mantras. I want to return to that article because there is a whole lot more to that article than what I discussed in One hot mess of thought, which really was a hot mess. I also forget that just because I post a link to something, it doesn’t mean people go and read it. I’m going to try and do a better job of calling attention to items that I post that are really worth going and reading on your own. Mormon Mantras is one of them.

The article was sent to me because of my very first post, titled Listening, in which I talk about meditation and the benefit that I get out of it. Looking back at when I started the blog, I am reminded that the month or so before I started it I was in the habit of meditating almost daily. Although maybe the word habit is a little strong for doing it regularly for just a month. Either way, it kind of laid the foundation for my blog.

I want to get back into the habit of meditating regularly again. Phil describes the benefit he got out of meditating. He started the practice because he was having lots of shoulder pain and headaches and anxiety and depression as a result of an injury he sustained a year earlier. Initially the meditation helped with his physical ailments, but as he got deeper into the practice of meditation, it expanded to other areas of his life. In his words:

Almost immediately, I noticed that my scripture studies were more insightful and my prayers more rich and profound. I soon realized that mediation was not primarily about relaxation and stress reduction but rather an awakening into the Spirit—and that this communion with the Spirit had the power to heal and transform.

After seven months of devoted meditation practice, I began to have consciousness-expanding experiences that provided exhilarating moments in which I felt a deep sense of oneness with the universe and all of creation. I also began to identify much more with my spirit instead of my body, thoughts, and emotions.

As the months passed, unhealthy thought and behavior patterns receded and Christlike virtues became more deeply rooted. After three-and-a-half years of daily meditation, I experienced the realization that, without the goal-setting or other conscious self-improvement efforts I’d tried in the past, I had become much less defensive, selfish, impatient, and judgmental. I had also become far more emotionally vulnerable, open, and honest.

I use to be fairly skeptical, but I think there’s a lot of power in the practice of mediation. I decided I want to engage in it more regularly (daily), and to get myself started I’m going to declare now until Christmas a month of meditation. It’s official, maybe I can get Andrew to make T-shirts. Does anyone want to join me? If you need more details about how to meditate, read the article linked above. Maybe cool things will happen to you if you give it a try…(seriously, as ridiculous as it may sound to just sit there Indian style [is that PC?] with your hands on your legs and thinking about nothing or repeating some mantra, you will be surprised at what it does for you if you’re patient with it.)

Cell Phone POW! #5 and possible spinoff??

This cell phone POW! comes from Quinn. I think I know what’s going on here. Correct me if I’m wrong. Quinn is in the market for a new car and he saw this one on the street with a for sale sign in the window. He really likes it, but isn’t sure how it would be received by others. He came up with the brilliant plan of floating it through as a POW! to see what kind of response it gets. I’ll go ahead and cut to the chase for you, Quinn. What do you think? Should Quinn pull the trigger on this one? Is it his color or should he hold out for something a little bit flashier and brighter?

I have a bunch of other good POW! submissions. I thought about either posting more than one a week on this blog or creating a spinoff blog of POW! goodness. I think I might do the latter and see what happens. Maybe that will be a Thanksgiving weekend activity.

Did anyone watch Glee this week? Bathroom humor usually doesn’t slay me, but when Finn was on the phone with Kurt in the bathroom at Quinn’s house and said, “I have to go, they’ll think I’m pooping!” I lost it. I think because it caught me off guard. Sometimes Finn has some really great unexpected lines like that. Also funny was the whispered line, “I think the duck is in the hat” and “Listen you little psycho, if I don’t get enough sleep my antidepressants won’t work and I’ll go crazy and I will kill you!” That’s funny chit.

Oh, and Ariel, I think you really did kill my fish. I don’t see them down there, are they showing up for anyone else? Don’t let Ariel near your pets, she will maliciously over feed them until they die. She may not eat animals, but she obviously has no problem killing them.

Thoughts on Winter and Sarah Palin

Last night at choir rehearsal, I was supposed to give a thought based on the text of one of the songs we are singing. We were running short on time, though, so I didn’t get to give it. So I’m giving it to you guys. The song is ‘Tis Winter Now and the text is by Samuel Longfellow, younger brother of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I can’t remember who arranged it and I don’t have my music on me. Maybe one of my choir peeps can chime in. Anyway, here are the words:

‘Tis winter now; the fallen snow

Has left the heav’ns all coldly clear;

Through leafless boughs the sharp winds blow,

And all the earth lies dead and drear.

And yet God’s love is not withdrawn;

His life within the keen air breathes;

His beauty paints the crimson dawn,

And clothes the boughs with glittering wreaths.

And though abroad the sharp winds blow,

And skies are chill, and frosts are keen,

Home closer draws her circle now,

And warmer glows her light within.

O God! Who giv’st the winter’s cold

As well as summer’s joyous rays,

Us warmly in Thy love enfold,

And keep us through life’s wintry days.

What I love about this song is that it isn’t all lollipops and mistletoe. Not that I don’t love lollipops and mistletoe, but I love art and music and movies and literature that present a scene or situation that is bleak and dreary and then show the hope or beauty that exists in the scene or situation or the beauty that can result. I think sometimes we look at life as either good or bad. If things are going well for us, life is good. If there are cold, sharp winds then life is bad. I love the first line of the second stanza after the first stanza sets up a scene of cold barrenness. And yet God’s love is not withdrawn.

Musically, there is a lot of oooing that sounds like cold and bitter winds, but then there are also sections of really beautifully rich and warm chords. I love it when I’m able to figure out how to let the two coexist in my own life and see the beauty that can exist in unexpected places.

On a completely unrelated note, has anyone else been watching Andrea Mitchell report on Sarah Palin’s book tour? Hilarious. All through her reports she seems like she is on the verge of cracking up. This morning they had a clip of her interviewing Sarah in a crowd. It’s very subtle, but when it went back to Andrea to do the wrap up, her eyes were just slightly wider and lips pursed a tiny bit more and you could almost see the words “Can you believe this lady?” scrolling across her eyeballs.

I don’t get what the fascination is with her. Help me understand. To be clear, I don’t think she’s a horrible person. If we were neighbors and our kids played hockey together, I’d totally chat her up at the games. I’d invite Todd over to watch the superbowl and share a six pack. Oh never mind, I don’t drink beer or watch baseball. I’m not a hockey mom either. Yet. I’m sure I could exchange pleasantries over the fence though.

Emotionally flat and surveying the land

Last night I had a session with my counselor. I walked in and she asked, “What’s up? You seem emotionally flat.” Those might not have been her actual initial words, but those are the words she used to clarify what she was asking. I hadn’t really thought much about it and said, “I dunno, I don’t really feel flat.” I think I did feel some absence of emotion but hadn’t really thought about it much because it wasn’t any extreme emotion.

So we went through our session and something that we talked about towards the end sparked an understanding of where the emotional flatness might be coming from. I can’t remember exactly what we were talking about but it occurred to me that the last couple weeks I haven’t been as enthusiastic about blogging. Ever since I started the blog, whenever I think of something I want to blog about I completely dive into it. A lot of it has been to help me process things. I process stuff best when I write it out and it’s also been exciting to share my thoughts with others.

Another thing about the blog is that it’s been a coming out tool of sorts. In the past year or two I’ve been on a path of gradually coming out to friends and family. I realized last night what great material the blog and coming out has been for me. It’s helped me change and deepen existing relationships and I’ve created exciting new ones. It’s given me lots of raw emotional material to work through. It’s helped me understand better who I am and what I’m capable of. The past year or two have been transformative to say the least. Ask anyone who has been walking with me through it that last few years.

The last couple of years have also been a period of intense reconciliation between my testimony and my homosexuality. Not that I think I now have that all figured out, but I feel fairly comfortable with things as they are right now.

Now I’m finding that all this is becoming fairly normal to me. The journey is still exciting, but not nearly as much as when I was in the thick of it. That’s where I think the emotional flatness comes from. I’m not trying to ascribe any great or deep meaning to this. I’m just sitting back and observing. I feel like I’ve come through the most intense part of my own great awakening and reached a plateau and I’m curious to see what comes next. Stay tuned.

Oh, and here’s my wordle. If you go to http://www.wordle.net/ and put in your blog address, it will take commonly used words from your blog and create a word cloud. I’ve seen a couple other people do this and thought it was cool.

Sunstone not Treadstone

This past weekend I went to a Sunstone symposium in Seattle with Ellie, Ginger and Seth. Last March Ellie and I went to the symposium in San Francisco and that was my first one. The Seattle one was much smaller and was held at some rowing club a few miles outside of downtown Seattle and the heater was not working well because we were frigid the entire day. I am normally one that likes things on the cool side, but my feet and legs from the knees down were frozen until well into the afternoon and by afternoon I was beginning to get sick from our lunch. I ended up hoarking in a Chevron bathroom in Tacoma on the way back to Ellie’s parents’ house that evening.

Needless to say, the cold and the beef brisket declaring war on my stomach made it hard to concentrate at times. Also making it hard to concentrate was the presentation on the settlement of Arizona by early Mormon pioneers. Not interesting.

It definitely wasn’t all bad though. Margaret Young, mentioned in this post and this post, did a presentation on Mormon Literature. Margaret teaches creative writing at BYU and is the current president of the Association for Mormon Letters. She is a fantastic story teller and shared a couple of amazing stories from her own life. She also talked about Mormon literature and how there’s a lot of not so great stuff out there and how it’s currently very Utah-centric and how she’d like to encourage more literature from outside of the Mormon belt. We are a world wide church with a vast and diverse membership, but you’d never know it by what you see at Deseret Book (including art work, not just literature). Anyway, I obviously always love hearing from her.

Back to lunch though. I was sad that it made me sick because it was delicious. The four of us wandered up the street to this BBQ place called RoRo’s. I got a beef brisket sandwich and sweet potato fries and was way happy. Also contributing to my happiness was the fact that RoRo’s was not an icebox. Maybe that’s why the food tasted so good to me.

We had a server there who was hard to figure out. She had very manly facial features, but heavy dark red lipstick. Her eyebrows and lips, as Ginger so accurately described them, were overwhelming. She had eyebrows thicker than mine (not that I have big unruly bushes for eyebrows, but if I didn’t trim and pluck, they’d definitely be unsightly). This lady though, looked like she colored her eyebrows or filled them in with a pen to make them very thick and black. She also wasn’t wearing a bra and I think she was very cold standing at the cash register by the door. They kind of assaulted us when we walked in. It was the first thing everyone noticed, except for Ginger, who couldn’t get past her overwhelming lips and eyebrows.

Also fun was the ferry ride to Seattle early in the morning where I made Ginger take the picture below of a nice old man sleeping on a bench. Precious.

PS, did anyone notice that there are fish to feed at the bottom of my blog? Click to feed.

I posted this and then noticed that two of the presenters at Sunstone posted what they presented at By Common Consent and wanted to include links. Check this and this out.

In case you missed it

The LDS church announced yesterday that they support a Salt Lake City law that would prohibit discrimination against gays in housing and employment. Prop 8 was painful on both sides, but I'd like to believe that no matter how a person feels about gay marriage, surely we can all agree that no one should be fired or not be able to get a job or housing simply because he or she has attractions that were not chosen. Read all about it:

LDS Newsroom

LA Times

NY Times

Wall Street Journal

Deseret News

SL Tribune

Huffington Post

Here's another article that I'm adding to the mix, sent to me by a friend. It's by Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic

Why can't we be friends?

A while ago in moho blogoland there were some posts about friendship. That got me to thinking and my thoughts have been simmering on the back burner for a little while now and I think I’m ready to serve up a helping. One common theme I’ve noticed in moho blogs and in groups I’ve been a part of is the desire by moho’s to find that one best friend “that totally gets me”. I remember feeling that as well. I wanted that one best friend that was just like me and who I could do everything with. I felt very different from other guys at school (because I wasn’t interested in the same things and was attracted to them instead of to the girls) and thought my life would be much better if I could have a BFF just like me. I’m aware, by the way, that this isn’t unique to homosexual Mormon men.

As a result, my approach with friendships became the chameleon approach. I was Julia Roberts character in the Runaway Bride. My friendships involved me trying to become the perfect fit for whoever my current friend was. I was always just along for the ride. My friend KaRyn coined the term “come along friend”. Or maybe it was Alie? The term wasn’t coined specifically for me, but I was classified as a come along friend.

Martha Beck talked about this idea in an article of hers that I read on CNN a while back. I copied the article into a word document but sadly didn’t copy down the URL. Sorry. Anyway, she had the following to say about romantic relationships, but I think what she says is also applicable to friendships or family relationships.

There's a thin line between a romantic statement like "I love you so much, I want to share my life with you until death do us part" and the lunatic-fringe anthem "I love you so much that if you try to leave me, I'll kill you."

People who say such things love others the way spiders love flies; they love to capture them, wrap them in immobilizing fetters, and drain nourishment out of them at peckish moments. This is not the kind of love you want.

The way you can tell real love from spider love is simple: Possessiveness and exploitation involve controlling the loved one, whereas true love is based on setting the beloved free to make his or her own choices.

Perhaps you are neither a spider nor a fly, but a chameleon who morphs to match the one you love. Or you may date chameleons, choosing partners who conform to your personality. Either way, you're not in a healthy relationship. In fact, you're not in a relationship at all.

If you're living by the "We are one" ideal, it's high time you found out how terrific love for two can be. Follow your heart in a direction your partner wouldn't go. Dare to explore your differences. Agree to disagree. If you're accustomed to disappearing, this will allow you to see that you can be loved as you really are. If you tend to dominate, you'll find out how interesting it is to love an actual person rather than a human mirror.

At some point I began to realize that my desire to have a best friend who was just like me was more about wanting to validate myself because I didn’t feel good about who I was. If I found a best friend just like me, then it would be ok to be me. In the meantime I would try to morph myself to try and be exactly who someone else was. This was back when I saw my uniqueness as a bad thing and not as a good thing to feel confident about. Fortunately, that has all changed.

The bad thing about how things were before it all changed though, is that I couldn’t ever really accept the love I got from others, because they weren’t loving me…I didn’t really even know who I was. I was an amorphous personality. If people said they loved me or paid me some compliment, it always just bounced right off my amorphousness.

Now, however, I’ve explored who I am and opened myself up to let others in and take a tour, even of the stuff that I swore I would always keep secret. I have a better sense of who I am and let others see it, and as a result I’m able to accept the love and compliments I get from others because I’m able and willing to recognize it in myself. I also know that these kind expressions are coming from people who know all of me, even what I considered to be the darkest parts of me. I can no longer use the excuse, “they only say nice things because they don’t know about this or that.” They know it all and yet these people are willing, even anxious, to see the good in me.

As a result, I’ve also noticed I’ve become much more able to feel the love of God, or what I identify as the love of God. It’s difficult because he’s not a tangible person that we can be in the same room with and audibly hear speak to us. I really believe it’s our more tangible earthly friendships and relationships that help define our relationship with him, so it should probably come as no surprise that as my earthly relationships have deepened and become more meaningful, so has my relationship with God.

Any post that starts with a picture of Paris and Nicole and ends with my relationship with God has to be a good one, right?

I have never...

FHE last night was fairly entertaining. We played the game, I Have Never. If you’ve never played it, everyone sits in chairs in a circle with one person in the middle who says something he has never done. If it is something you have done, then you have to get out of your chair and find another chair to sit in and the person left without a chair is “it”.

The fun/devious part of the game is revealing secrets about others. Once when I played at BYU, the person in the middle said something like, “I have never made out for three hours in the back of a pickup truck at Squaw Peak.” His roommate sheepishly got up out of his chair.

Last night, Courtney thought it would be funny if she got in the middle to say she has never kissed anyone in the room. I got in the middle before she did and I looked at her to see if I could use her idea and she gave me the nod, so I said it. As soon as it came out of my mouth, in all the confusion of people getting out of their chairs to find another one, I heard someone shout, “LIAR!!” It turns out, I had forgotten all about the incident at the ward campout when we played kissing rugby and I pinned a girl in the ward to the ground and forced myself on her.

Another funny moment was when someone said he had never kissed a man. I got up, thinking it would cause a stir, but then something like 6 other guys stood up. Totally took the wind out of my sails. I guess some people kiss their dads.

Cell Phone POW! #4

This picture comes to you courtesy of me! I got some other good pics this week that I’m sure I’ll use in the future, well except for yours, Quinn. Sorry my phone ate it. :( This one was taken Wednesday while I was out running some errands during lunch. I’ve seen this rectal clinic building before, but it occurred to me when I saw it again yesterday that it would make for a good POW! If I had taken a wider shot, you would see that this short ugly building sandwiched between two taller buildings has two small windows with bars on them. I was going to take more pictures but then someone was walking up to the building and I figured having to walk into that building would be bad enough without having someone taking your picture. So I’m thinking there’s no way this is really what the sign says it is. It’s gotta be a front for something else. What though? Get creative.

I don’t really have any more explanation about last week’s POW! other than that it’s a goat with a bag on its head. I don’t even know where Stina saw that goat, but I’m guessing it was at work or on her way to or from work. She works in the country. I did, however, like the image that Courtney painted of Stina knocking the goat unconscious to take it home to make artisan cheese to sell at the farmer’s market. She’d totally do it.

Remember how I told you about the guy at work that shaved the top of his head so he could be an elderly Harry Potter for Halloween? I kind of assumed that he would just shave the rest of his head after Halloween was over. Nope. He’s just letting the top grow out. Somebody should tell him it looks ridiculous.

I went back to Yakuza (the place I mentioned in this post) and got a full on kobe beef burger, as opposed to just a kobe beef slider. The burger was incredilicious X 5. I went with Stina and interestingly enough, the beef patty (the word patty seems insufficient though as the slab of beef was like an inch thick) had a thin layer of goat cheese on it. Courtney, may actually be on to something. Stina may have some sort of weird obsession with goats and their cheese.

One more thing, if baseball preempts Glee one more time, I’m gonna go all Nancy Kerrigan on those baseball players.

One hot mess of thought

I’m not sure if I’ve ever blogged about this before but I know I’ve thought about it. I’m too lazy to go through past posts to check. If the first part of this post is a repeat, then deal. I have a really fantastic counselor. Some of you have heard her speak or present and know what a wonderfully wise woman she is. In one of our sessions we were talking about her approach to counseling. My memory of the conversation is a little bit hazy, but I remember her saying something about how counseling/therapy isn’t about the content of our lives. I kind of understood what she was saying at the time, but it’s something that I’ve been chewing on ever since (I seem to use lots of food imagery in my posts).

Now I’m going to jump a little bit. Remember, it’s all about putting together all the pieces. This past week, a friend sent me an article by Phil McLemore entitled Mormon Mantras: A Journey of Spiritual Transformation, which much more eloquently expresses what I was trying to express in my inaugural post. Phil’s article is definitely well worth your time and there are several themes in there that I could probably do many other posts on. Read it. The idea I wanted to focus on from that article for now is the following:

Many people associate their spirit with their mind and personality. However both one’s mental activity (thoughts and emotions) and personality traits can be observed. Whatever we can observe is not really us. We are the observer: the capacity to observe is a characteristic of spiritual awareness.

Our minds—which include our perceptions, thoughts, and emotions, as expressed through our bodies and behavior—were intended to be reconciled to perfections of spirit. However, we are seduced so much by the noise, form, and activity of the material world that we lose awareness of our true identity and become identified primarily with our thoughts (mental noise) and bodies.

Ok, so that might seem kind of weird and mystical and hard to grasp. I’ll bring it down to a personal level now. About a month ago, I had a session with my counselor that included lots of discussion that was nearly exclusively about my homosexuality. At the end of the session she asked if I realized that was the first time we spent the whole hour talking about just that.

Jumping again, I often use my blog to come out to people. I recently told a friend about my situation, gave him the address to my blog and said that I blog about balancing being both a Mormon and attracted to men. I just quickly scanned my posts though (I guess I’m not so lazy anymore) and rarely do I blog exclusively about homosexuality. I’ll make reference to it here and there and I’ll have an occasional post dedicated to it, but it’s certainly not the focus of my blog.

So there are a bunch of pieces. I’m not sure I’ve brought it all together in one coherent idea or thought. Maybe it’s better if I don’t. I guess maybe it’s that I think sometimes we become prisoner to the content of our lives instead of seeing the content as clinical material that we use to create something better with. Act instead of being acted upon. What did you think? Was that all just a rambling mess? What did you get out of the article? Is there another idea in there you think I should explore in another post?

Three Classy Ladies

I have a couple of posts brewing (but not stewing, because beef and barley is gross). It’s a busy week, though and the posts are taking some effort to think through and pull together. In the meantime, here are some gems to keep you entertained. I may have something for tomorrow.

1. Has anyone heard of Elna Baker? I first heard of her in an interview that BCC did for her recently released memoir, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance. She’s a Mormon comedian in NYC and has done bits on NPR and for the Onion. I got her book for my birthday and I’m excited to crack it open.

2. If you have children and a home, you should read my friend Margaret’s blog, bonbonliving. You should also read her blog if you enjoy the writings of a witty, insightful and stylish woman. We used to work together at BYU and passed the time eating microwave popcorn and taking online personality quizzes and downloading music on Napster. Those were the days.

3. If you are wondering how you can help children in Uganda, check out my friend Ellie’s organization, Peace for Paul. It’s a nonprofit that is bringing kids in off the streets and out of the slums and giving them the opportunity to go to school and to live in a more stable and loving environment. They are raising money to buy land for an orphanage and to sponsor more children and could use whatever you are able to give.

There you have it. Three classy ladies. Check them out.

Cell Phone POW! #3

Here's this week's POW!, submitted by Stina. All I know is that the animal is a goat. That's what Stina told me anyway. My question, however, is how do you know it's a goat with that thing on it's head, hmmm? How do you know it's not a satyr like this or like this or like this? Maybe that's a magic bag on it's head and he believes it will make him become either fully man or goat. Or maybe he's just embarrassed by his half man/half goatness and hides his shame under a bag. What do you think is going on here? Explain.

Last week's POW! was a table at the Jordan Commons movie theater in Sandy, Utah. It was late and the table had already closed for business, but I'm guessing they were selling spiced nuts or something. Oh, and when I asked for no graphic porn, that doesn't mean you couldn't have gotten PG-13. I liked Quinn's idea that it was a registration table at a speed dating conference.

Just some other Friday odds and ends now. Can someone tell me what the deal is with this Calfskin Formal Bow Pump for men at Brooks Brothers? Is this something you wear with a tux? Is it a European thing? Will I get beat up by the Elder's Quorum if I wear those pumps to church?

Today at work a guy is dressed up as an old man Harry Potter for Halloween. He shaved the top of his head (this guy goes all out every year) so that he has an old man, receding hairline cut. He's wearing glasses with round frames and a white shirt with a green striped tie and a black robe. He looks exactly like Henry B. Eyring. It's uncanny. And a little disconcerting.

(The) Darkness

Last year for Halloween I dressed up for the first time in several years. My friend Andrew talked 4 of us into doing a group costume with him. We were a band of supervillains called The Darkness. Or maybe it was just Darkness. We debated between the two and the difference was important. I can’t remember which it was now. We all had names that started with D. I think I was The Devastator. Or maybe that was someone else. There was The Danger and The Deliberator. I can’t remember the other names. Damn, it’s only been a year and already the details are sketchy.

Some details aren’t sketchy, however, like how much time we spent making these costumes. This wasn’t a deal where we just looked for crap around our homes or made one trip to Goodwill. Andrew doesn’t do anything half way.

The color scheme for our costumes was black and silver with red accents (I promise I was the only gay one). We ordered black unitards and printed our logo (yes, we had a logo) in silver on our chests. Our individual names were printed in silver down our arms, and we had a tramp stamp in back and surprisingly enough, I can’t remember what it said. Maybe some of the others can help me out with the details. We also had really cool silver utility belts with the logo on the buckle.

From there we each added our own accessories and embellishments. I had a cool faux leather looking black cape and wrist cuffs with three steel spikes out the side on each one. The wrist cuffs were made of scrap linoleum and paper mache. The boys did furry briefs. We bought some black Hanes and then sewed furry material onto the Hanes. The easiest way to sew on the furry material and make sure they would still fit was to sew it on while wearing them. I may or may not have accidentally sewn my furry briefs to my jeans. We affectionately referred to the briefs as “loin warmers”. The girls were totally against the loin warmers at first, but then we explained that the added fluffy texture would help disguise certain things that would be accentuated by wearing a tight fitting unitard, they were totally on board.

I found some cheap boots to wear but they only came up barely above my ankle and looked kind of lame, so I used left over furry material to extend the boots to mid calf. Kind of like leg warmers. Here’s a picture of us receiving our much deserved prize for best group costume. I don’t think the others will mind me posting this picture. I think there are much more embarrassing ones on Facebook from the late night photo shoot we did afterwards.

Witchy Woman

I went to step class on Saturday morning. I ended up only doing the first half, which is just cardio. The second half is with weights and my back was feeling tight and knotty, so I opted out of the second half because I didn’t want a repeat of this.

I got there and got myself all set up and situated and this lady who I’ve seen at the class a couple of times was there and set herself up right behind me. This woman is probably at least 70 and is always wearing the same t-shirt when she comes to class. It says “Witchy Woman” on it. One time, a long time ago, she got mad at someone for setting up too close to her. The combination of her witchy woman t-shirt and that experience from a while ago and that fact that she has this really thick Scottish accent has left me with the impression that she is an angry woman. What is it about a Scottish accent that makes it sound like the person is angry at you? Another funny thing about this woman is that she also always wears those fluffy chenille socks that are meant to just be worn around the house. They are totally unelasticized and so they just bunch up thickly around her ankles. She also wears old school umbro soccer shorts and has short short white hair.

So she got all set up behind me and started to chat me up. At first it was fairly innocuous…weather changing, the class isn’t so crowded this morning, etc. Then she crossed the line into conversation that you save for people you actually know, like surgeries she’s had recently, her mother who is still in Scotland (who’s got to be damn near 100 years old), etc. As she tells me all this stuff, she starts to take her pants off. I know they were just warm up pants and she was wearing her umbro shorts underneath, but there was something about watching someone old enough to be my grandmother take her pants off that made me a tiny bit uncomfortable. I felt like I should look away, but she was talking to me and my mother taught me to look at people when they are talking to me.

Anyway, we can add her to the cast of characters at step. What to call her though? I think Witchy Woman would be too obvious. If Courtney and I needed to talk about her, she might catch on if she’s nearby. I’m thinking something less obvious. Chenille perhaps.

Cell Phone POW! #2

Here is the first Cell Phone POW! submission, which comes from my friend Matt. For an explanation of the Cell Phone POW!, please see Elmo down below. I thought about posting the picture and then explaining what it’s a picture of/where it was taken, but I thought it would be much more fun if I post the picture with no explanation and then leave it up to you to provide the explanation. It could be an explanation of what you really think the picture is of or about, or you could make up some ridiculously fanciful tale. (I realize I’m taking a bit of a risk opening it up like that, especially with this picture. No graphic porn, please.) Then maybe with the following week’s POW! I’ll tell you what it actually is. Or not. We’ll see. I do have a submission for next week though. This seems like it will be a nice Friday installment.

Marinating vs. Stewing

This post is kind of a follow up to Help, I feel bad, in which I talked about the importance of letting yourself feel things instead of trying to avoid emotions. I talked a little bit about this idea in Just let it sit and marinate. That post, however, was more about letting myself feel something good, but the same thing applies to negative feelings and emotions too (or feelings and emotions that are traditionally seen as bad or negative anyway). Whatever it is we’re feeling, we need to let ourselves sit and marinate in it. Sorry for the germaphobes who are disgusted by the imagery of sitting in a vat of marinade with raw meat.

There are two ideas I want to explore. The first is the title of the post. I think it’s possible to sit too long in our emotions and for it to turn into a gross and stagnant stew. Beef and barley, probably. I also don’t think that it’s just the length of time that determines whether it’s a marinade or a stew. I think how we go about exploring what we’re feeling and what we do with it can determine whether it’s a marinade or a stew.

I’m having a difficult time though, pinpointing what the difference is in more concrete, tangible terms. I can sense the difference though. Marinating allows me to feel it but it also ends up moving me to a better place. Stewing is stagnant and holds me back. And it smells like beef and barley. Gross. Another thought I had was that maybe what I would consider marinating would be considered stewing by others and vice versa.

I want to know if anyone else has thoughts on this. What’s the difference between marinating and stewing for you? How would you explain it? Would you use food to explain? Would you put the cooked meat back in the same dish it was marinating in? If so, I don’t want to know what you have to say anymore and please don’t ever invite me over for dinner.

The other topic is what our role is if we are not the one currently marinating in something difficult but if it is someone we care about who is marinating. For this I will quote Henri Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest. Read all about him at the Wikipedia link. He’s pretty amazing.

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief or bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”

“Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to the place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it. As busy, active, relevant ministers, we want to earn our bread by making a real contribution. This means first and foremost doing something to show that our presence makes a difference. And so we ignore our greatest gift, which is our ability to enter into solidarity with those who suffer. Those who can sit in silence with their fellowman, not knowing what to say but knowing that they should be there, can bring new life in a dying heart. Those who are not afraid to hold a hand in gratitude, to shed tears in grief and to let a sigh of distress arise straight from the heart can break through paralyzing boundaries and witness the birth of a new fellowship, the fellowship of the broken.”

Cell phone pic of the week (POW!)

Friday I went to a movie with some friends. We met at my friend Ginger's house to carpool and I found the above on the floor of her front room. It appears that someone pantsed Elmo and pushed him to the ground. Not cool. Look at those wide eyes as he reaches up with one hand for help. I, of course, had to snap a picture with my cell phone before leaving. I wish I could say that I stopped to help Elmo and his pants up, but I just kept on walking out the door after snapping the picture. Heartless. (cue Kanye)

Then I thought maybe I should start something called cell phone pic of the week. Or maybe just pic of the week so that it can be called POW! Have you captured something ridiculous or disturbing or silly or clever on your cell phone? Send it to me and maybe I'll put it up. The only rule is that it can't be staged by you, you just have to happen upon it and capture it digitally.

This could end up being the first and last installment of POW! It all depends on whether or not you or I find anything worth snapping a picture of.

What's this a picture of, you ask?

Apple crap. My friend Diana invited some people down to her parents’ house in Corvallis to make cider. Don’t worry though, it wasn’t the fermented kind…although I could probably let the cider that I came home with sit out for a while…

Her parents live in an adorable house kind of in the woods. Seriously, these are direct quotes from the directions she sent us to find the place. “over the railroad tracks, past the gas station/country store” and “about 20 feet later there are 4 mailboxes on your left and a dirt road on the right” and “go through the forest” and “ignore the tacky no trespassing signs.” Needless to say, my car got lost and appropriately enough, we ended up in a town called Tangent. Perfect.

Pressing cider was fun. Here’s a link to a Wikipedia article, however, the traditional cider press that is pictured there looks more like a medieval torture device as opposed to what we used. The picture above is what’s left over after you’ve pressed all the juice out. They just put it in the compost pile, but we were trying to come up with other things we could do with the apple detritus. I came up with bricks, if you mixed it with some sort of natural mortar and then viola! Organic bricks!!

After pressing cider, Diana’s mother fed us a delicious dinner of BBQ beef sandwiches and soup and fresh fruit and vegetables and apple pie and, of course, the cider we had just pressed, which was seriously amazing. After the food had digested some, Diana’s dad brought out his collection of didgeridoos. Of course. We took turns attempting to play, but for the most part just made a bunch of really awkward noises. After failing at that, a couple of us took turns on the piano, an instrument we were much more familiar with, and had a Wicked/Little Mermaid sing along. It ended up being a fairly magical day.