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.

Help, I feel bad

Sometimes the universe speaks. Sometimes it’s in scattered fragments, but when I listen and try to piece it all together, something beautiful happens. I’m going to jump around in this post and it might seem kind of disjointed, but trust me. I’m just showing you all the pieces. I think the title of my blog might be taken as a request that others listen to who I am. When I first settled on the title though, it was all about ME listening to who I am. Blocking out voices from different camps or people or institutions or cultures and really listening to who I am instead of listening to what I perceive that others think I should be.

Yesterday I began to blog about something I’ve been feeling the past few days or so but couldn’t figure out how I wanted to approach it, so I abandoned it and posted about spam email instead. I’ve been feeling a little bit disconnected. I can trace it to things that are going on in life for me right now and that have happened this week. For the most part nothing serious, but it’s left me feeling a little out of sorts the past few days. The title of this post is actually the subject line of a spam email I got today. Even spam can sense that things are slightly off.

I don’t want to blog about the specific things that have thrown me off because I don’t think those specifics really matter for what I’m trying to accomplish, particularly with this post. I have a fantastic counselor and in one session we were talking a little bit about her approach to counseling. She said that it’s never really about the content of our lives or what happens to us. It’s more about how we process the content or what happens to us.

I’ve had a conversation or two recently with a couple friends about going to the Dharma Rain Zen Center for a little meditation. The conversations reminded me of when I went the first time about a year and a half ago, which reminded me of the journal entry I made about that experience:

There’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It’s been simmering inside me for the last 4 or 5 months. It’s been a running theme all that time that resurfaces again and again. It keeps getting presented to me through different experiences and people and therefore is becoming fairly deeply ingrained. I had one such experience last Thursday. I went to the Dharma Center in Southeast Portland with a friend to give the practice of formal meditation a try. They had a beginning class that had six of us including the teacher. We gathered in a circle on our mats and cushions and the teacher gave us some background and taught us some basic principles of meditation and posture, etc. She told us the basic idea of meditation is to be completely present with what is occurring at that moment. To shut out the past and the future and just focus on right now and how your body feels. And very specific sensations like your breath moving in and out of your nose. The idea is to sit absolutely still and be in touch with what you are feeling now. Someone asked what if you have an itch? The teacher said sometimes she can’t resist and just has to scratch that itch, but that the idea is that you just let it be, you let it happen and that eventually you will notice that it just passes. Eventually it subsides. All that reminded me of what I’ve been thinking about lately about allowing ourselves to experience difficult things/emotions. Often times we want to avoid the feelings, run the other way, or lose ourselves in other things that help us not to feel the difficult emotions…we lose ourselves in work or school or toys or friends or to-do lists or the internet. The idea though is to be still and let those negative emotions wash over us, allow ourselves to experience them and allow them to do what they are meant to do, having faith that just like the itch, eventually they will also subside. That’s not all though. At President Hinckley’s funeral, his daughter spoke. She talked about some of the difficult things that President Hinckley had gone through. She talked about when Sister Hinckley died and how lonely and painful that experience was for Pres. Hinckley. She said that he allowed himself to feel it, to experience it, then he took it to the Lord so that He could use that experience to carve out a greater portion of his heart for compassion. If we allow that whole process to take place, we open ourselves up to be molded and shaped by our Creator, who knows and loves us perfectly and completely, to reach our full potential. But if we allow the process to be hijacked by self medication, we take ourselves further away from who we really are and feel even more detached from our emotions, who we really are, what our potential is, what it is we really want vs. need and in some ways the most dangerous of all, we become detached from the desire to be true to ourselves and the desire to do what we know we should.

So that’s where I’m at. Sometimes we find ourselves in a funk and sometimes we understand where it's coming from and sometimes we don't. The important thing is to let it do what it’s supposed to do. In the meantime, I’m watching Glee tonight and the premiere of 30 Rock and I will be wearing my snuggie while I watch.

Your best stallion being solution, part II

A couple of months ago, I posted Your best stallion being solution and I've decided to post a second installment. For an explanation of what this is, go to the original post. Here are some more enjoyable spam email subject lines. Please share your own if you have some.

*Turn Brain on!
*Damn, will you answer?
*Energy enough for many girls (apparently spam doesn't know me very well)
*Gay marriage trolling
*Alice on coke
*Learn blind-type skill
*The Elephant Seducer mini-game (what??)
*Hippie Museum arrested
*Free hugs event
*Britney embedded ass-jewel (again, what??)

Fashion Shows and Football Games

I had a fairly well rounded weekend. Last week was fashion week in Portland and so Friday night I went to my first fashion show with five classy ladies. It was fun, mostly because it was something new and different. The venue was pretty cool too, it was held in some large warehouse in a shipyard.

I’m pretty sure, however, the organizers of the show didn’t have anyone on their team that had any kind of operations experience. They were supposed to start seating at 8:00, but because they messed up the seating they had to rearrange stuff and didn’t start seating until probably around 8:45. They didn’t really announce that either. There were a bunch of us waiting to get in and the only way to know what was going on was to go to the front of the line near the door and ask the intimidating bouncer guy with a plethora of piercings. Anyway, there were many other things that weren’t very well planned out like turning in your ticket to get another ticket and only having one lady at the desk to handle all of the exchanging of one ticket for another ticket.

We all bought general admission standing tickets in the back but just before the show started there were a few chairs on the second row that were open, so the usher gave a few of us those seats. In the picture above, we are probably just barely out of the shot. Some of the models kind of creeped me out by their extreme lankiness and wide set eyes. One of the girls I swear was not human. Most of the show was women’s fashion. Sadly, there were only about three male models in the entire show. I would have liked to have seen more men’s fashion. Seeing more male models wouldn’t have been all that bad either.

Afterwards, we went out for a late dinner at Andina for some Peruvian food. I wish I could upload some of the food for you to download and sample. Delicious. I had Mahi-Mahi and this amazing asparagus quinoa fried rice. I was surprised with every bite at how delicious it still was.

Saturday night we had an Elder’s Quorum activity and we watched football and ate BBQ’d hamburgers. I am certainly no fan of football. The last time I sat through that much football was probably when I was at BYU and worked in the president’s box during the football games. The irony that I had such fantastic seats to every home game was not lost on my roommates. Suckas!! In spite of not liking football, the activity was fun. There was good conversation and I have some really great friends in the quorum. It was nice to just hang out.

Sidenote: the jacket I wore on Friday is in serious need of a washing. After Lebanese food for lunch, Peruvian food for dinner and a bonfire on Saturday after football, it is full of all sorts of pungent odors.

Nobody Knows

If you live in Utah, there's something on TV tonight that you should watch. It's a documentary called Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons. It airs at 9:00 pm on Channel 7 and then again on Sunday, October 11th at 4:00 pm. It was co-produced by Margaret Young, a professor at BYU and a crush of mine, and Darius Gray, who is a member of my parents' stake and was president of the Genesis Group, which was organized under the direction of the first presidency in 1971 to support African American members of the church.

The documentary explores when and the reasons why the priesthood ban was put into place and debunks some of the myths surrounding the reasons for the ban (curse of Cain, etc.) and does so in a candid, respectful and inspiring way. It includes interviews with members, nonmembers, black members, white members, etc. You get a pretty well rounded look at the topic.

If you don't live in Utah, buy the DVD. Or you can borrow it from me if you live near me.

Conference Memories

Since this past weekend was general conference, I thought it might be fun to post a conference memory, although it's not really one of my own memories. It's a talk that was given by Boyd K. Packer back in the October 1976 priesthood session of general conference, and in my opinion has to be in the running for the most awkward conference talk ever given. It's not posted in the online archives of conference addresses at LDS.org but you can find it elsewhere. It's called "To the Young Men Only". I'm glad I wasn't alive for this. Given my extreme discomfort with anything sexual as an adolescent, I'm pretty sure I would have died on the spot.

This talk was first brought to my attention only like a year or so ago, but I have friends who say they have received copies of the talk in pamphlet form as young men. Does anyone out there remember when the talk was given? Were you there? Did you survive? How's your factory?

Wrestling with contraries

A while back, I posted something about healing the world. I made reference to that whole prop 8 thing that was going on about a year ago and said that I thought each side of the argument saw the other side as an exaggerated caricature of who they really are. Some smart lady left a comment on that blog post in which she quoted James Harvey Robinson, an American Historian, who said, “Partisanship is our great curse. We too readily assume that everything has two sides and that it is our duty to be on one or the other.”

Two assumptions that I agree contribute to the curse. One, that every issue has just two sides and two, that it’s our duty to choose a side. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t take a stand for what we believe in. I just think we should hold off sometimes in doing that until we go through a process. Too often we take the lazy route and just adopt the side that we would be expected to adopt. I’m a republican/democrat and this is what a republican/democrat believes. I’m a Mormon and this is what a Mormon would believe.

We do it with politics and other issues and we also do it with people. I’ve decided I don’t like that person so I’m going to ignore anything good they might have to say and focus on finding faults to further justify my feelings toward that person. The opposite could also be true. I think that person is amazing and I will mold and shape my beliefs according to what that person says/believes. We try to figure out what box to put people in so that we can then know how to treat them.

My friend O-Mo recently posted something interesting and a little bit vague, which I thought was smart. When I first read it, I thought he was merely stating two sides of an argument and demonstrating that he was comfortable not choosing a side for now but merely considering both sides of an issue. I think I came to this conclusion because one of the things that I admire about O-Mo is that he’s willing to acknowledge and explore the many sides of an issue without feeling like he needs to immediately adopt a side. He clarified what he was trying to do in the next post and said he meant Chris to be a gender-neutral name and that the arguments presented could be used to promote either same sex marriage or opposite sex marriage. I wasn’t dead on with what he was trying to do, but was pretty close.

An anonymous somebody left what I thought was great comment. He starts out by quoting Joseph Smith, who taught that “by proving contraries, truth is made manifest.” Go back and read the comment, it’s really great. I guess the purpose of this post is to encourage more of that in myself. To allow myself to acknowledge and explore the good and bad of the many different sides of an issue or person instead of immediately trying to fit something into one of my own premade boxes.

For the 'rents

32 years ago today my mom gave birth to me. I was born at 7:11 AM and weighed 7 pounds and 11 ounces. Any numerologists out there that can tell me what that means? It’s gotta be something good, right? Sometimes I like to just say that I was born at 7-11 and let people assume I mean the convenience store. Actually, I remember last year going shopping last year with friends for fabric for our Halloween costumes (Yeah, it was a very involved Halloween costume. That might be a post for another day. I’ll just say it involved a unitard and furry briefs.) I did the 7-11 joke and we carried the joke even further and said my mom just HAD to stop at 7-11 for a slurpee and some slim-jims on the way to the hospital and out I came.

My relationship with my mother and father has morphed over the years, as it should. They will probably tell you I was their easiest child. I never got in trouble. There was that one time in high school that involved the police (another post for another day), but they didn’t really punish me. We drove home after the police released me to my parents and they just said something like, “We probably don’t need to tell you how dumb that was.” Other than that though, I never gave my parents any reason to stress.

That kind of changed when I hit my 20’s. It all started with me dropping the gay bomb, followed by intermittent crises that most likely WON’T be other posts for other days. Suffice it to say, I more than made up for being a model child with the misadventures of my 20’s.

As I look back though, I realize that my parents have hardly, if ever, pressured me to date or marry a woman. They never really pressured me to try and change my attractions. As I look back, more of that pressure probably came from me. This isn’t to say that my parents are perfect. I’m sure they would be willing to admit that they’re not, as would my siblings. I think a difficult part of growing up is realizing that there isn’t a magical age when you suddenly know everything and become a perfectly responsible adult who knows how to handle every situation. Just like everyone else, my parents are no an exception to that.

So now I’m in my 30’s and I can feel our relationship maturing, especially over the last several months. I'm learning to let go of the ridiculous and unrealistic expectations of who I’d like them to be and to love them for the beautiful people that they are. Thanks for bringing me into the world. I love you!