Arachnophilia?

I don't kill spiders. I may have mentioned it once or twice before, but I don't expect you to remember. One summer in my teens, I went to take a shower and found a spider in the tub. This was not uncommon in the summer, and I generally washed them down the drain, but for some reason that particular summer day, I decided to capture the spider in a jar and take it outside, and that became my standard procedure for such situations.

That was probably a decade ago, and now I've grown into a man who is nearly unable to kill crawling things. I am puzzled by the culture I live in, which instills in young minds the belief that killing bugs is not only acceptable but actually a sort of duty--unless the bugs in question are ladybugs or butterflies, in which case it's a crime. I don't harbor any ill feelings toward our pesticidal society, but I've often wondered why it is we go out of our way to crush the poor boneless ones.

Here's the irony: I'm a bit of an arachnophobe. I think spiders are ugly, creepy, icky things, and I feel revulsion when I see them. I understand why people kill the spiders they find in their houses because even a decade of pacifism hasn't removed from me the natural inclination toward destruction. But I can't do it. Once, early on in my marriage, I killed a rather large spider that had found its way into our apartment. I did it to show my wife I wasn't a ninny. After I did it, I was so beset by guilt that I wasn't quite myself the rest of the day. So I've never done it again. Now whenever I find a spider in our apartment, I catch it and take it outside. My wife has laughingly pointed out that I do this even when the ground outside is covered in frosty snow or puddling rain, which may well dictate a crueler death for the spider than a quick blow from a shoe, but I don't do this because I love spiders--I don't love spiders! If I loved them, I might let them live with me. But they're frightening little beasts, and I hate them, so I don't let them live with me. But I do let them live--or at least throw them out to the elements where they can suffer a natural death and turn into dirt. The odd-shaped cog of my mind that dictates my conscience says that's better than killing them outright.

I've tried to come up with justifications for my behavior (I don't want insanitary spider guts embedded in my carpet. Spiders eat flies, and flies are more proactively annoying than spiders are.), but why should I feel compelled to justify my desire not to kill? The truth is, I'm deeply embarrassed by the fact that I can't kill spiders--especially since I hate them. See, if I had an academic interest in those eight-legged fiends and could discourse on their invaluable contributions to the local ecology and was fascinated by their anatomy, then it would make sense that I would not want to kill them, and if anyone asked me why I didn't kill them, I would have a good reason. But I'm not that guy. I see spiders as nightmarish creatures, and I wonder why God didn't make them more cuddly because, really, a fly-eating pet would be pretty awesome. And so I'm embarrassed that I feel guilty when I kill them, but guilt trumps embarrassment, so I go on not killing them.

I feel like Kierkegaard would have had something to say about this, but I don't know what it would've been. Perhaps he would've examined the paradox of harboring a murderous hatred for something but feeling a moral necessity to preserve its life--he might have called the paradox Love. Who knows....

There's got to be something to say about the way I treat spiders and why I do, and I'm convinced there's a parable in here somewhere. At any rate, there's a moral to this story, and it isn't, "Ugliness isn't a capital offense." It's something more than that. Something about love and hatred being totally unrelated to tolerance. I can't quite seem to formulate it, so I'll leave that up to you.

I miss my blog

The Eccentric Sage has sat in disuse for a long time now. It's tragic, really. The heyday of blogging is something I now think of in fits of nostalgia, if I think of it at all. Yet I still follow some blogs--meaning they secretly feed into my Google Reader, and I glance at the posts an read most of them. I've become a spectator in cyberspace, participating only when I feel a strong inclination to do so--and I don't feel that way often. Still, if other blogs are still running strong, why shouldn't this one? The blogosphere has not collapsed, despite the vacuum I've created there.

And so--I'm back. I've given The Eccentric Sage a much needed facelift, and I'm posting again. I'm not promising that I'll ever post with the frequency I once did (I'd say I peaked in the summer of '08), and I actually have no intention of dedicating that much time here. This blog was fueled by the angst of my bachelorhood, and I've been happily married for 20 months now. Also, I don't want to join the masses of bloggers who say, "I'm totally back and I'm gonna post every day and you guys should visit my blog because it'll be so totally awesome!" and then goes another 8 months without posting. No, this will be a very different blog from here on out, I imagine, and I'm marking the change with a titled post. Now, instead of a place to vent my angst, The Eccentric Sage will be a place for me to probe reality. I admit that it may be hard for anyone but me to detect a difference in the resultant posts, but I feel different, and it has been nearly a year since I last posted--and much longer than that since I posted frequently!--and I really feel no inclination to make a conscious effort to recreate what once was. I just need a place to think in written words, and I imagine that's what blogs were invented for.

So here we go.....

Post 239

So, it's officially Christmastime. The passing of Thanksgiving lifted my wife's moratorium on Christmas music, so I'm listening to lots of it now. I don't know what happened to me last year, but it was the first year since halfway through high school that I wasn't offended by Christmas music being played ridiculously early, and this year I found myself turning on holiday jingles whenever I was driving somewhere without my wife. It's good to wait till after Thanksgiving, though: since there are only, like, 30 or 40 really good Christmas songs in existence, I'd probably get sick of it by mid-December if I listened to it non-stop.

Anyway, the point of this post is to once again demonstrate the awesome breadth of the internet's reach. When I was very young, we got a Christmas basket from a family in the ward, and one of the things in it was a tape of really random Christmas songs. I remember several of them (one called "Santa Got a Cold on Christmas Eve," one with a refrain that began, "We are Santa's reindeer / We've learned to sing this year," one sung in a weird accent about how the kids go nuts at Christmas, a version of "I'm Gettin' Nuttin' for Christmas" that ended with a burglar coming in a Santa suit...), but my favorite of all of them was a song by Mel Blanc. I remember it was by Mel Blank because my eldest brother had to explain to me who Mel Blanc was when he told me who sang the song.

I loved that song as a kid, and the inventions of Google and YouTube have made me try every year to find it online. This year, I finally did (thanks to Google, not to YouTube). I can't embed it here, so just click on this link to listen. (NOTE: my wife wasn't terribly impressed; I think it'll probably appeal to you a lot more if you're, say, 7 years old.)

Merry Christmas!

Post 237

[NOTE: this post is lengthy because I'm writing it for mostly cathartic reasons. If you want to learn some interesting stuff without finding out how I myself found this stuff, just hop down to the very bottom of the post and read my findings. Otherwise, get comfy: you're gonna be here a while!]

Years ago--probably more than a decade ago--ya know, back when I was in high school--my Sunday school teacher (who had previously been my bishop) was in the habit of writing a quote on the board before class started each week. One week, it was a quote from Goethe. I don't recall how my Sunday school teacher rendered the quote, but I've always thought it was "Choose well, for your choice is brief yet endless."

I like that. I think it's very fine. Stirring, poignant. Recently I've been thinking about it a lot, and I decided that I wanted to know what the actual quote was and where it came from.

The most common rendering of the quote it, "Choose well; your choice is brief, and yet endless," though it can be found with just "yet" and just "and" and even with "but" instead of either. It appears on many, many quote pages, usually attributed to Goethe but never any of his works. I Googled and Googled and Googled trying to figure out where it came from, hoping that I could find the original German and figure out whether the double conjunction was a vital part of the quote or just the most famous translation.

Usually, if something can be found on the internet, I can find it through Google in no more than a few searches and a couple of minutes, but it took me, like, two hours to find the information I'm about to share with you, and I hope that by collecting my findings here on my blog I can aid future researchers with their quest.

The first thing I discovered is that Masons love this little line, and the reason they love it is that it came from a poem Goethe wrote about Masons (Goethe was one himself). But none of the sites about Masons and Masonry said anything about the original poem except that it was translated into English by Thomas Carlyle, and it's Carlyle's English translation that they always talked about.

Carlyle's translation (entitled "The Mason Lodge") is where the quote comes from. I looked at a few different pages that had the full poem, but they all gave Carlyle's version without any mention as to what he translated it from. But then--a breakthrough.

I found a website that had English versions of three Goethe poems about Masonry: "The Mason Lodge" translated by Carlyle, "A Symbol" translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring, and "Song Of Fellowship" also translated by Bowring. The important thing, though, is that the website says that Carlyle's "The Mason Lodge" and Bowring's "A Symbol" "are both translations of the same original, written in 1827, but so different that they even have different titles!" (source link).

"A ha!" I thought. "I'll just compare the line in the two different poems and see which I like better!"

Not that easy: Carlyle's "Choose well; your choice is / Brief and yet endless" corresponds to Bowring's "To do what is best, Unceasing endeavour!"

Somebody cheated!

I got this far in my quest in a few searches and a couple of minutes, but the puzzle I found here propelled me through my desperate search for the next few hours.

I still don't know where Carlyle's translation was published, but I found (courtesy of Google Books) a book by Bowring called The Poems of Goethe Translated in the Original Metres. I found "A Symbol" in there and found a footnote that said, "This fine poem is given by Goethe amongst a small collection of what he calls Loge (Lodge), meaning thereby Masonic pieces."

Because Bowring was interested in maintaining "the original metres," I thought that perhaps his title for the poem would resemble the original title more closely than Carlyle's, so I used a few different online translators to translate "symbol" into German, and they all gave me "zeichen."

I looked and looked for something by Goethe that had "Zeichen" or "Loge" in its title, and I found nothing except a book called Wielands Andenken in der Loge Amalia, which I could find no machine-searchable version of. I looked to see if BYU's library had a copy, and they do--on microfiche.

No good.

I Googled the web for anything that talked about Carlyle and Goethe or Bowring and Goethe; I searched for websites that had side-by-side English and German versions of Goethe's poems; I searched Wikipedia for the quote; I perused Goethe's and Carlyle's Wikipedia pages--couldn't find a thing.

I actually gave up after a while. I decided that there was no way I was going to find the original poem and decided that I would just compare the number of pages Google came up with when I searched for the quote with various conjunctions, with and without quotation marks, appending Carlyle -Goethe and -Carlyle Goethe to see who was most often given credit for the quote--all this just to know what the most common version of the quote was and who the author is most commonly supposed to be.

I learned a funny thing about Google search results a couple years ago in a class I was taking: when you search for something, and Google tells you it's come up with, say, "about 21,900 results," if you go to the bottom of the page and hop over to the very last page of results, you often find that Google only actually found, like, 153 results (those numbers come from a quick search of "brief and yet endless" [with quotation marks]). I kept this in mind as I tried to figure out which version of the quote produced the most pages, and that's why magic happened.

On the very last page of a search for the quote and Goethe and Carlyle, I found a page in German. I can't read German, but I understood well enough the phrase "Goethe und Carlyle" and I recognized a new word: Symbolum.

Symbolum??? That's not German--that's Latin!

Ah, mais bein sur! This is the 1820s we're talking about--of course the title's going to be in Latin!

I Googled Goethe Symbolum and found a Wikipedia page called "Symbolum." This page only exists in German Wikipedia, but I glanced over it and--hallelujah!--the poem was there. I had Google translate the page, and then I looked at the poem and found my line: "Missed practice not to / The forces of good!"

grumbleWORTHLESSgrumbleCRUMMYgrumblegrumbleAUTOMATEDTRANSLATIONgrumblegrowlgrumble

But at least now I had the title of the original poem. Early on in my searching, I had found a website that had the poems of Goethe in both German and English, but it had been useless to me because it had the poems organized alphabetically by German title, and they didn't have a poem called Zeichen or Loge. Now, knowing that the poem is actually called "Symbolum," I Googled my way back to that site and found the poem in both German and English.

The end of my quest, you think? Wrong: it had Carlyle's translation!

Gar!

I kept looking, but all the sites I found used either Carlyle's or Bowring's translation, so I gave up on that. I went back to the German Wikipedia page for "Symbolum" and found the line I was looking for and then hopped over to Babylon online translation and translated the words one at a time.

This, of course, gave me something that was no better (even a little worse) than Google Translation's version.

In a fit of futility, I copy-pasted the entire phrase into Babylon, and that's when I finally found what I was looking for: "Do not fail to exercise the forces of good."

So Carlyle and Bowring were both cheating: neither one of them came anywhere near what the original German said!

At least now I know....

So here are the lessons learned:

1) Babylon online translation is amazing. To be able to identify and translate an imperative phrase is very impressive to me (that is assuming, of course, that it actually is an imperative phrase; I don't know German, so I really can't say for sure, but the translation sounds very convincing).

2) Perhaps everything I could ever want to know is on the internet, but sometimes it's very hard to find.

3) [and this is the important one:] "Choose well; your choice is brief and yet endless" is 100% Carlyle! It may have been inspired by Goethe, but it doesn't even approximate anything Goethe wrote, so it probably ought to be attributed to Carlyle instead. (Even though I still have no idea where Carlyle published his translation, his version is so consistent from one website to the next that there's no real reason to doubt the double conjunction.)

Post 235

In response to what's going on over in Thutopia right now:

My relationship with money has always been a bad one. Not to say that I'm a hoarder or a gambler or a thief or a con artist or anything like that; me and money, we just don't get along so well. It's never been a reality for me. Even as a kid, it was just too theoretical a construct for me to grasp.

I was a strange kid (and still am, I suppose, in many ways). I can remember being no more than 5 or 6 years old (judging by the house we were living in) and trying to wrap my head around the relativity of money because the older of my two sisters had tried to explain to me that, though $100 seemed like a lot of money to us kids, it wasn't a lot of money for our parents, who had to pay on a mortgage and pay bills and buy food for a family of 8. This notion of relativity really got to me and the realness of money started to fade. Consequently, I can remember being 8 or 9 or 10 and getting in an argument with my nearest-aged sibling because I maintained that money was nothing more than paper, that it had no value, that it wasn't real. I can also remember being about the same age and pressing my parents for answers about what money was for, why we had it, who made it up, how it worked, and isn't there a better way? I remember in my early and middle teens getting in arguments with my mom because (get this:) she wanted to give me an allowance! She had set up a merit system in which we kids would do our daily and weekly chores and mark a calendar to say which days we had done them, and then she would pay us at the end of every month according to how much we had done. The first few months, I refused the money, telling her that she needed it more than I did and that I was confident that she could put it to more productive use than I could, but she insisted that I take it. Finally, I got wise and did my chores but simply neglected to mark the calendar. I can distinctly remember her being irritated and telling me that she knew I did my chores and then giving me an allowance anyway. (Meanwhile, the other two kids at home were constantly saying things like, "I really did do my chores; I just forgot to mark the calendar!" to which my mom would respond, "Do you think I'd get paid if I forgot to fill out my time card?")

What a strange kid I was--what a strange man I've been! I just glanced over the posts on this blog under my "money" label, and my my my how quickly I've forgotten how passionately I bashed money less than three years ago. As a kid, I just didn't understand it; as a young adult, I actually hated it. Now, as I near my quarter-century mark, I feel something entirely different, which strangely enough hearkens back to something that predates the money-bashing posts of this blog.

The final few months of my mission sent me home thinking about money a lot. In my penultimate interview with my mission president, he told me to be a millionaire. That really caught me off guard. He was telling me how much potential he saw in me, how great he thought I could become, and then he said, "You could do anything--be anything. Be a millionaire, Elder Jepson. There's nothing wrong with financial success. Be a millionaire and give it all to the Church."

A few weeks before that, my companion and I had been teaching a lesson to a man named Mickey Traylor. He was telling us about the circumstances that caused him to move from Texas to a suburb of Boise, and it mostly had to do with the fact that he had been getting so caught up in his financial success that his relationship with his wife had started to suffer, so he called it quits and took her far away to a place where they could just relax and enjoy each other.

"Money'll change you," he said.

"Money wouldn't change me," my companion assured him.

"Only people who've never had money say that," Mickey said. "I used to say that, but then I got money, and it changed me."

At the time, I thought that conversation was the final nail in the coffin of my estimation of money, but then I had that interview with my mission president, and I got confused.

Then came the very last day of my mission. My zone leader arranged for a member to give me and a few other home-bound missionaries a ride to the mission office. This member was a very wealthy man, and his advice to me as a returning missionary was to go home and make as much money as possible. "The Lord can't use you if you're poor," he said.

That naturally offended me, but the rest of his conversation was even worse. He spent the drive telling us the way he had amassed his wealth, and it was unethical and perhaps illegal. I really didn't understand, but I'll try to explain: he said that right after he got married, he bought a little house. Before buying it, he got it appraised at well more than it was worth, and then got a loan for the amount of the appraisal. He then talked the seller into selling it for much less than the advertised price, used his enormous loan to buy the house, and used what was left from the loan to invest enough money that the interest paid for (or at least helped to pay for) his monthly mortgage payment. Once that house had paid itself off, he sold it and bought a bigger house in the same way, which he sold and bought an even bigger house. He finished by saying, "I now live in a two-million-dollar house that pays me to live in it."

This man, for whatever reason, could not go all the way to the mission office, so he dropped me and the other missionaries off at another man's house. Some other home-bound missionaries met us there, and then that man gave us a ride to the office. When I asked this second man what he did for a living, he said, "As little as possible," which did not impress me. When I asked him for more details (because he had a nice living situation for someone who was at home in his PJs halfway through a Wednesday morning), he said something like, "Basically, I convince people who have a lot of money that they should have meetings with other people who make a lot of money so that they can learn from each other how to make even more money, and then I convince them to pay me a lot of money to set the meeting up."

And thus my conflict began. My mission president had exhorted me to become a millionaire, yet the wealthy people I met didn't make me want to join them. Very early on in my mission, I had had dinner with an anesthesiologist and his family. They lived in an enormous brick house with lots of land, but the kids of the family didn't think they had anything. From their conversation, I gathered that each child (I think there were four of them) had their own private room and bathroom and that for Christmas they had each gotten their own ATV, yet they were completely dissatisfied and asked their parents over and over, "When are we going to move into that big house we looked at?" I had at the time an awful sort of lurking pride regarding my middle-class (arguably lower middle-class) upbringing, and I was disgusted by those children.

When I first moved to Provo, I quickly became overly fond of this quote by Brigham Young:

The worst fear that I have about this people is that they will get rich in this country, forget God and his people, wax fat, and kick themselves out of the Church and go to hell. This people will stand mobbing, robbing, poverty and all manner of persecution, and be true. My greater fear for them is that they cannot stand wealth; and yet they have to be tried with riches, for they will become the richest people on this earth.

I guess I mostly lacked faith in myself. I assumed that if I ever became wealthy I would subsequently become petty, greedy, snobbish, and unaffectionate.

I've changed now. I've recently come out of a phase in which I was seriously considering pursuing a career in law. I think my highest desire right now--and this is certainly resultant from my recent wedding--is to become an excellent breadwinner. I still don't aspire to wealth, but I do hope for some material comforts. I never hope to have an expensive car or a mansion on a hill or a private jet, and I hope that if I'm ever in a financial situation to see such things as viable options that I'll find a better use for my money.

After that interview with my mission president, I decided that perhaps the most admirable thing to be is a middle-class millionaire, and in the past couple years I've discovered that our nation has quite a few of those--in fact, all the best financial advice these days is to live poor so you can retire well. I struggle with that idea because my immediate response to such advice is always, "What's the point of having all that money if you don't do anything with it?" I don't hope to have a Ferrari, but I do hope to have good, reliable transportation. I don't hope for a mansion, but I want a house that holds out the rain. I'm quite fixed on the idea that my kids will share bedrooms and bathrooms, but I don't want to shove them into bed-sized closets when I tell them good-night.

I guess what I'm saying is that I do want money, but I want happiness more. If I ever have money, I hope to use it well.

Be a millionaire, Elder Jepson--just don't be stupid about it.

Post 234

Go me! I feel so validated! It's great!

I'm going to graduate in April, which means I only get one more semester after this one to milk my undergraduate career for all it's worth. One thing I've kinda been regretting recently is that, despite earning an English minor, I have yet to take a single creative writing course. It's just one of those things that I always wanted to do but never made a priority, and now I'm pretty well out of time.

There are two levels of creative writing courses here at BYU: a 200-level survey course that introduces students to methods of writing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and then there are three different 300-level courses that specialize--one for fiction, one for nonfiction, one for poetry. It's the 300-level nonfiction course that I've always been interested in, but the 200-level introductory course always stood in my way, and there were always other classes that I felt were more important.

Well, registration is approaching once again--the last time it will for undergraduate Schmetterling. About a week ago, I was looking at classes, trying to figure out my final semester's schedule, and I whimsically pulled up the nonfiction class. It has two sections, one of which is taught by a teacher I've heard very good things about--especially in regards to this class. An English-major friend of mine, upon hearing that I was interested in creative nonfiction, told me that this professor "is the king, queen, and prince of creative nonfiction." I really want to take this class.

I glanced at the prerequisites just to make sure that it was impossible when I found a loophole: "ENGL 218R or instructor's consent." So I decided to try my luck by sending the professor an email asking him whether there was any chance I could get his consent.

His response:

Thanks for your interest in the class. I rarely make exceptions, but I'd gladly take a look at a sample of your writing to determine whether you can take the class without the prerequisite. Send me something?

The juxtaposition of 'rarely' and 'but' made me feel less than confident, but I had to try it--especially since he was willing to give me a chance. I dug through my computer files, looking for something worth banking on. I found nothing. And then I thought of my other blog, so I grabbed a story off of it, gave it a quick brush up, and sent it off to him.

Four days went by--which, really, that's pretty impressively prompt for a professor to read a 6 pages of stuff written by a student trying to work the system--but it was still nerve wracking. Frankly, I'd already resigned myself to never being able to take that class.

'TIS NOT SO!

Today I got this email, which made me feel oh so very good about myself:

That's a fun piece to read. I like it. You have my permission to sign up for English 317R. I look forward to meeting you next semester...

Yay me!

Post 213

Hey friends. Because I've become such a once-in-a-blue-moon sort of blogger (not as bad as some, I know, but far worse than I am wont to be), I thought I'd give you a post that is completely new and different in style and media and whatnot.

I work as a research assistant. It's mostly mind-numbing work. To keep myself from going crazy, I made myself a Pandora radio station with 99 Luftballons as a seed song. I have since been very much enjoying the music of female artists from the 80s--and they are fantastic! My girlfriend gives me some ribbing over the fact that I suddenly have a crush on the music of the likes of Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, but it's good stuff! Don't believe me? Well, let me prove you wrong, friends--let me prove you wrong! Behold! Music that you can't listen to a be unhappy; if you are unhappy, it will cheer you up:

Post 206

I'm famous!

At least, I will be so long as this site stays under construction.

(Thanks to Schlange for alerting me to this)

Post 174

So, I've been cuddling with my parents' dictionaries again. I love these things, man. 1984 World Book Dictionary--if you can get your hands on 'em, they are so much fun! Every time I go to look up a word in them, I get distracted by some other word, and then I get lost in all the awesome words I'm learning.

For example, this evening I was looking up prolix because I was a little unsure of the way Hong was using it in his translation of Kierkegaard's Works of Love. After reading its definition ("using too many words; too long; tedious") and being satisfied, I permitted my eyes to wander around the page, whereupon I noticed prolegomenon ("preliminary material in a book, teatise, or the like; preface; introduction"), prolegomenous ("of or having to do with prolegomena"), and prolegomenary ("=prolegomenous"). Just above them, I found prolapsus, which is the same as prolapse, which means to slip out of place but is only used when speaking of bodily organs. Cotinuing to the other half of the open spread, I found prolongate (which is merely a prolonged form of prolong) and prolusion (which is yet another word for an introduction and has it's own adjectival partner prolusory). I also learned that Prom (like in high school) is short for promenade, that pro memoria is Latin for "for a memorial or remembrance," and that Promoter of the Faith is the same as devil's advocate.

Now, all of these things may be the sort of stuff you can find in a normal dictionary; it was when I took my que from Promotor of the Faith and headed over to D that I remembered just why I love this particular two-volume dictionary so much.

I have to wonder what sort of standard the editors of this great work used to establish what a word really is. Now, I'm all for including any utterance that communicates something in common usage in a dictionary, but that's more feasable now that we have online dictionaries; back in 1984, space constraints were certainly a big deal, so how do you decide what makes the cut?

And how common was the word demothball back in '84? Especially meaning "to return (military or naval equipment) to use by removing the preservative coating in which it has been stored"?

But that's not the best one. My new favorite word--the one of all of these that is, I hope, most likely to become commonplace in my vocabulary--is deux-chevaux. Literally, it's French for "two horses," but my dear, dear 1984 World Book Dictionary defines it as, "an automobile with a badly worn-out engine with only as much power as one would suppose a two-horsepower engine to have."

Lookout, world: I'ma gonna be insulting your cars in French now! Deus vult!

(Deus Misereatur....)

Deus vorbiscum.

Post 172

I finished my finals yesterday--and already I'm going through academic withdrawls. I suppose the next couple weeks will find me striving to become inured to ennui. Oh well. At least I have my vocabulary to keep me warm....

Post 168

Well, I'm rearranging things here in my little corner of blogdom again. Most of the changes are things you probably won't notice or care about (I made my labels more consistent and concise; I changed my "About Me"), but here is one thing you may care about: I've made a second blog.

This blog is The Eccentric Sage. I called it that because I didn't want this to be the sort of blog that is dedicated to the life and drama of its author; I wanted the posts to be things that would appeal to a much broader audience than people who know me personally. I like to think I've done an okay job at that. However, occasionally I do things that are so crazy that they deserve to be shouted into cyberspace, so I have created a place for them to go. The posts on my second blog will probably tend to be longish, but my hope is that they'll be worth reading. I don't really care if they aren't, though: I mostly just wanted a repository for my insanity. There isn't much there yet, but I will be adding to it a lot, I'm sure.

Enjoy!

Post 165

So, a little while ago, there were these posts that people I know were putting on their blogs that listed their quirks. Cunfuzzled was first, and I thought, "Dude, Schmetterling, you totally got this," but when I started a new post, I came to the realization that I have no quirks.

(I can sense your eyebrows raising, dear readers, even as I type this.)

But I've been thinking about it some more, and I've decided that, yes, I do have a few quirks, and now I've managed to come up with a few that are worth mentioning, so here they are.

Quirk #1: I can't kill creeping things.

This quirk irks me occasionally because, frankly, it's pretty inconvenient. The worst thing is that I brought it on myself: when I was in high school, I decided that there was no reason for brazenly killing things on the sole basis of their number of legs, and so I stopped stepping on bugs. Somehow, that simple decision exploded into a condition that is now bigger than I am. For example, the last place I lived had this crazy flying ant infestation--no drone ants anywhere to be found, but flying ants all over the place! But I couldn't kill them. Nevertheless, their incessant buzzing got on my nerves, so I resorted to trapping them in a harmonica box and taking them outside. Very inefficient and fairly difficult, but I just couldn't bring myself to kill them.

A couple of days ago, a ginormous spider came out of nowhere while I was using my computer and scared the crap out of me (figuratively speaking). The thing was huge and I was chagrined to see it coming out from behind my monitor because that is right beside my bed, and I don't want fuzzy creepy crawlies sleeping with me. But I couldn't kill it. Spiders are faster and smarter than ants, so catching it was tricky, but I couldn't kill it and I didn't want it living in my room, so I persisted until I had successfully released it into the wild.

The strange thing is, I'm pretty sure I could kill a cow or a deer or even a cute little bunny if I needed the food--certainly wouldn't do it for sport, but for food, I really think I could. But I can't kill bugs. This, I think, makes me completely backward in modern American society.

Quirk#2: My eating habits lack luster.

I have eaten French toast virtually every morning that I've made myself breakfast (easily above 90% of the time) for more than three years now. I never get sick of it. I thought I would a long time ago, but I never have. In fact, sometime, as I'm drifting off to sleep, I think, "Oh boy! I get to have French toast in the morning!" and that thought actually makes me so excited that I have trouble falling asleep.

I am not the sort of man who requires much culinary variety in general, come to think of it. It is not unusual for me to eat the same thing for lunch and dinner in a given day, and that's generally the meal I've been making for dinner every day for weeks on end. Right now, this is chicken and rice. A couple of months ago, it was pasta with chicken and sauce. I'm considering a return to pasta. But chicken is always the same--always.

French toast every morning, chicken for lunch and dinner. Is it any wonder I got salmonella? Just a matter of time, really.

While we're talking about my strange eating habits, were any of you my readers when I talked about my drinking problem? We'll call that Quirk#3.

And now you know that I'm not so normal as I seem. Whoda thunk, huh?

Poat 154

Hey everybody--it's been a while, and I have BIG NEWS!

So, I was down and out for a couple of weeks because I had (get this:) salmonella poisoning! Isn't that great? I always thought salmonella was an imaginary disease invented by mothers to keep their kids from eating cookie dough, but I guess it's real after all: I got it!

And, as if that isn't great enough, I ALMOST DIED!

I don't know much about vital signs, but when I had my roommates take me to the ER because my limbs were going numb, they were really worried about my vitals. Today I got a printout of my medical record; turns out my blood pressure when I was admitted to the ER was 72/42 and my pulse was 126.

That's baaaaaaaaad.

Isn't it great! This is so exciting: I almost died but, here I am, still alive! Go me!

Post 149

It's been a while since I've posted anything--long enough that Confuzzled's been complaining, at least--so here we have something totally unprecedented, something, in fact, that flies completely in the face of some of my most precious credos: a post wherein I'm nice to Confuzzled. Kinda. Actually, this is something that I've been meaning to do for quite a while, but it happens to be in response to something she said a couple months ago, so it might appear that I'm being nice to her, I dunno. If I am, in fact, being nice to her, we'll just call it an anomaly--me stirring the waters just to make sure we don't get stuck in a rut (er--canal, I guess, if we want to avoid mixing metaphors)--or something like that.

Rest assured, Confuzzled: I will, no doubt, be returning to the lambasting that we are all so much more accustomed to here shortly.

Anyway, anybody remember my review of Kung-Fu Panda? That post is an interesting one because I basically claimed that I laughed so hard while watching that movie that my brains fell out and I had no more desire to be a gloomy, pensive individual. In the comments section, my dear, naysaying brother questioned whether such a change could be made all at once, and I honestly didn't know.

Well, it's now been just over two months since I made that declaration, and, though I still find myself being isolationistic in my pensive habits on a regular basis, I think that I've generally become a more happy-go-lucky sort of individual. So take that, causality--er--whatever--!

I've actually wandered far away from where I intended to be, so let me back up: the reason I bring up that post is because Confuzzled commented and said, "Also, you should start writing jokes. Because I don't know any. And you could help me!" Though I responded to the rest of her comment, I purposely avoided that part of it because I wanted to do then what I was about to do now.

Ya see, just a week or two before the historic Kung-Fu Panda Post, I had auditioned for a stand-up comedy club here at BYU, and I had just found out a few days before writing that post that they had decided that I was not funny enough to be in their club. Meh. Whatever. I wasn't terribly interested in being in the club: I mostly just auditioned for the sake of giving stand-up a try. I would've liked being in the club now, but I have different interests developing now that would probably conflict anyway, so 'sall good.

ANYway, what I wanted to do in response to Confuzzled comment that I haven't been able to do just now is to post my audition here. It took me longer than I expected to get that video file from the club, and it's taken me a few weeks to get around to using a campus computer that had the wherewithal to take the video from DVD to computer to blog, but I finally did it today, so here it is. This is me trying (and evidently failing) to be funny. I dunno, you be the judges of funny, I guess:




So there you have it. I generally consider myself a situationally humorous kind of guy: I ain't no performing monkey here to make you giggle on demand, no sir! But, if nothing else, I hope you can find humor in the attempt.

I have another, more melodramatic video I'd like to post sometime, but this has taken me a lot longer than I expected it to, so that will have to wait for another time, I guess.

Post 144

Lessons learned in life come in various ways. Sometimes, we learn from the mistakes of others; sometimes, we learn from our own mistakes; sometimes, we are wise enough to understand principles that allow us to avoid certain mistakes. I like to think that I often fall into this third category, but I realize now that I may just be that guy who cruises through life so oblivious to what's going on around him that he just assumes he hasn't made any mistakes.

Guilt is not something I'm generally apt to feel; I just don't really get worked up over stuff, and I sometimes have trouble understanding why people are so edgy. Someone offends me, I get over it; if it's really bad, I may have to sleep it off, but I usually can do that. I offend somebody else, if I'm aware that I've done it, I usually just don't really care.

Well no more; no more, I say! I'm going to start taking responsibility for my actions. I learned last night, by way of extreme social faux pas, that human relationships are fairly delicate things, that even the strongest of ties (not that I've had many like that, so I guess this is merely supposition) can be broken by a single thoughtless act. And for the first time in my life, perhaps, I feel badly about something I've done to someone else. And now that the guilt has started, I find myself seeking to purge myself of all previous offenses, walking around, apologizing to every person I've ever known, regardless of whether I can think of a good reason for doing so. It feels good, though most folks think I'm crazy, and I think it's long over due. I suppose that if I were to become that guy who does nothing but apologize all the time, I'd become tedious and nobody would really like me any more, so I don't intend to take it to that extreme. But I am calling off my total disregard toward other people and their opinions, and I'm going to strive to live my life a little less recklessly.

Perhaps this may seem to some the sort of change that cannot be made all at once, but, given the way I feel, that's exactly what I intend it to be.

Post 141

I am not a patient person--not generally speaking, at least. I've been trying to teach myself to play the piano for the past couple months, and sometimes I just get so frustrated at my fingers' disobedience. I have often tried to console myself by saying, "Rome wasn't built in a day," but I've occasionally been so upstartish as to wonder whether it would have been if it had been built by me.

But tonight finds me feeling peaceful and calm, filled with an unspeakable assurance that everything is going to be okay, that I'm going to be okay, and that I'm actually doing better than I sometimes give myself credit for. It's a wonderful thing, and I want more than anything to not screw it up. That's my goal.

I will probably still tend toward impatience, but tonight, at least, none of my normal anxiousness is accompanying my sleeplessness (which leaves the question, "Why am I still awake?"). I guess what I'm really trying to say, here, is that patience is a good thing--meaning, I guess, that I expect you to forgive me in advance for the week I'm about to go without posting anything because I'm going on a family vacation, so don't look for anything new to appear here until sometime during the early part of July.

Post 135

More thoughts on movies:

I saw Kung Fu Panda this weekend. Every preview I ever saw of that movie made it look incredibly la-ame (I thought), but a friend gave me very strong recommendation, and the reviews have mostly been surprisingly good (85% from Rotten Tomatoes, 7.8/10 on IMDb, and 3 stars from Roger Ebert), so I decided to give it a try.

I'm not sorry I did. In fact, I'm pretty happy I did. I haven't laughed that much in quite a while. Of course, if you're over the age of 13, you probably have to be a fan of Jack Black's humor for it to be really funny, but I think Jack Black is a funny, funny man, so I laughed a lot. There was this one part (the acupuncture scene, for those of you who have seen it) that, even now, has me giggling when I think about it. And it was consistently funny throughout. Really, if you're in the mood for a good laugh, this is a pretty good flick. It has--oh, it's just so funny at times!

I sense an intense revolution--a paradigm shift, if you will--coming my way. As I may have mentioned before, I go through phases--"It's a phase he's going through," is a pretty fair way to describe my behavior at any given time. At least, that's always been my theory regarding myself; lately I've been so terribly consistent in some of my opinions that I've occasionally worried that I've arrived, and I don't intend to really "arrive" until long after I'm dead.

So anyway, this change: I want to start running far, far away from my gloomy intellectualism. There was a man I met during my sojourn in Idaho whom I knew as Brother Ganns. He was a fascinating human being, absolutely fascinating; I had no idea people like him existed--never crossed my mind, actually--and, to my knowledge, he is the only one of his kind. The man gets up every morning looong before he has to so he can spend an hour reading from the Book of Mormon, and hour in the Bible, and then another hour in whatever his other reading happened to be at the time (when I knew him, he had finished his reading of Journal of Discourses, making a personal index as he went because he felt the published index was insufficient, and was then working on the complete works of Nibley). The man was the most intense gospel scholar I have ever had the pleasure of meeting; seriously, he could tell you anything you wanted to know about anything you could think of, and he could site sources to back up what he said. His library was very impressive, but the fact that most of it was in his head as well as on his shelves made it even more so.

The best part about Brother Ganns, though, was that he was a totally nut; I mean this man was crazy. He is the closest thing to a 6'2", 50-year-old Jack Russel terrier that I have ever met. Seriously, every time he saw anyone he knew, it was as though it was a happy reunion after a long separation. And, strangely enough, it was never weird, and it never got old. Quite to the contrary, actually, it was contagious, and every time I saw him made my day. He'd see us and just light up, and we'd light up, too, because he was, in fact, the most lovable individual I have ever known.

Even as a missionary, that was hard for me to understand, but the more scholastic training I receive, the more unfathomable he becomes to me because I am incredibly guilty of falling prey to the school of thought that says the only happy people are the ones who really don't understand what's going on in the world around them and that all the really smart people become cynics.

Well, I'm done with that. I'm tossing it off like an old coat. I'm tired of being pensive. From here on out, I intend to laugh more. From here on out, I intend to joke more, to become lighter in heart, to just generally be happier. I've posted a few things along the lines of "I'm gonna be happier," but I always wanted to cling to my dark realism. Book's I've read recently: Night by Elie Wiesel and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Cheery, no? The Jewish holocaust and the abuses against the Lamanites. I'm done with it; done, I say! I understand that the world has been and is and will be a somewhat terrible place, but I don't think focusing on that fact will help me grow a whole lot. In fact, it may be just as bad as all the happy feel-good escapist stuff I've been so down on lately--which maybe I'll start reading now, who knows!

That said, I do still expect what I read to be well crafted. I still think Iron Man should have died, but I'm okay with him surviving; I just wish that the story would have led to that denouement a little more logically.

So I'm repenting. I'm changing my gloomy ways. Who's with me?

Post 132

Prepare yourself for the marathon post of your life. Seriously, thisun'll probably go on forever. I don't expect you to read it all in a go; I'll try to give it several headings so you can read it here and there a piece at a time, so feel free to read it in part and comment on just that part or to read the whole thing and comment on it all or to peruse without commenting at all (though this last option is my least favorite, I must admit).

Today my thoughts dwell upon gifts, most significantly God's gift of His Son. There's a lot to be said, so I don't see brevity being much of a possibility (hence the foregoing disclaimer).

Where to begin? I suppose I'll start as fundamentally as I know how and expand outward. Here we go with heading number one:

God's Gift to Me

I know that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, that He suffered and died to save us all from sorrow and sin and ultimate damnation, that He rose from the dead and is now alive and well somewhere in the universe as a resurrected being. He is man in form, was born and grew up in the natural way, experienced life on earth just like anyone else. But He is greater than man, perfect and all powerful.

I hold this knowledge sacred. I consider my conviction of the above a dear gift to me from God (and, indeed, modern scripture verifies this notion). When I think of all the people who live or have lived without this knowledge, I feel deeply grateful to have been so blessed; I cannot imagine living without it.

God's Gift to All

The Atonement of Jesus Christ is the most far-reaching act to have been perpetrated upon this earth; it affects us all more than we can know and can affect us more than it does if we would let it.

Along with most of the Christian world (I imagine), I am a big fan of Isaiah's prophecy of Christ in Isaiah 53:3-6, but I think it says a lot more than many people realize, so I'd like to break it apart, take it in sections, and tell you why it means so much to me:

"SURELY HE HAS BORNE OUR GRIEFS, AND CARRIED OUR SORROWS" (v4)

This says nothing about Christ suffering for our sins or conquering death; rather, this says that He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. So many times, we think of the Atonement as this wonderful thing that makes it possible for us to be absolved from our sins, and it is that, but it's so much more than that, too! Christ has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; He knows what it is we struggle with, what weighs us down, for He has carried it already and will help us to carry it now. Just one verse earlier, Isaiah refers to Christ as "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief"; juxtaposing these two clauses makes them both more meaningful, methinks.

"HE WAS WOUNDED FOR OUR TRANSGRESSIONS, HE WAS BRUISED FOR OUR INIQUITIES: THE CHASTISEMENT OF OUR PEACE WAS UPON HIM; AND WITH HIS STRIPES WE ARE HEALED" (v5)

Now Isaiah gives to us the part of the Atonement that we more commonly think on. This verse is very good news for us. Without it, we would all be lost, for (as Isaiah points out in the next verse) we all wander off course: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all."

I love Jesus. To suffer for my sins and pains--and not just mine but everybody's!--I cannot fathom.

For a less succinct but more detailed description of what all Christ suffered for us, I refer you to the American prophet Alma and his address to the people of Gideon (or, more specifically, this part of it); I'll probably quote that scripture eventually, but if you're just reading this section of this post, that'd be a good way to finish your reading with something scriptural to ponder on.

He Will not Leave Us Orphaned

Among the many magnificent things Christ told His Apostles while they were in the upper room with Him prior to going to Gethsemane, he said, "I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you [and] because I live, ye shall live also" (John 14:18-19). [FYI: The Greek word orphanos (here translated "comfortless") means "orphans," which is why I titled this section the way I did.] Shortly after that, He said, "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid" (John 14:27).

The peace that can come to us through living the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a real wonder. "[N]ot as the world giveth, give I unto you," He said, but what exactly does that mean?

Though I dare not claim to know what was in His mind at that moment, looking at the aggregate of the LDS canon, I have noticed a few interesting things about peace: first, peace has nothing to do with what's going on around us; second, peace can mean a lot of different things (check it out). I'd like to focus more on the first.

PEACE LIES WITHIN

In the Book of Mormon, in the first chapter of Alma, a man named Nehor comes among the righteous Nephites and causes all sorts of havoc, teaching the people "that which he termed to be the word of God [...] declaring unto [them] that every priest and teacher ought to become popular [and] that they ought to be supported by the people" (Alma 1:3). Worse yet, "he also testified unto the people that all mankind should be saved at the last day [...] and, in the end, all men should have eternal life" (Alma 1:4), which philosophy enabled him to lead the people into all kinds of terrible sins. Ultimately, Nehor ended up suffering an "ignominious death" because he murdered a righteous man (Alma 1:15), but his followers continued in wickedness long after his death, and they "began to persecute those that did belong to the church of God, and had taken upon them the name of Christ" (Alma 1:19). "Now this was a great trial to those that did stand fast in the faith; nevertheless, they were steadfast and immovable in keeping the commandments of God, and they bore with patience the persecution which was heaped upon them" (Alma 1:25).

When I think of peace, I often find myself thinking of the sort of peace that Miss America always wishes for: the kind that involves everyone putting away their weapons and hatred and being nice to each other. In Alma 1, that sort of peace was not had among the followers of Christ. Yet Alma records that "they did establish the affairs of the church; and thus they began to have continual peace again, notwithstanding all their persecutions" (v28).

Peace has nothing to do with what is going on in the world around us. It's all about our conviction and the confidence and determination that come from knowing Jesus is the Christ. When we have that kind of peace, it really doesn't matter whether war rears its ugly head all about us; we can be assured that all will be well--ultimately, at least. For Christ "will come to [us] [and] because [He] live[s], [we] shall live also."

The Refiner's Fire: A Prologue

Malachi said, The LORD "is like a refiner's fire, and like fullers' soap" (Malachi 3:2). I didn't know anything about fullers until just now when I looked it up (fuller, soap, fuller's soap), so I don't have any analogies to pair with that part of Malachi's statement. But I do have an earful on the Refiner's Fire, so here we go.

I won't take the time to relate to you the story of the women who visit the silversmith, but it's a good one if you haven't heard it (if you've heard it a million times like me--and half of those times, it was told poorly--then the effect of it has probably waned a bit since you first heard it, which is why I don't feel inclined to retell it). The basic thrust of the story (as with most stories relating to this concept) is that all that pain we deal with is good for us and that God won't give us more than we can handle (which is vaguely reminiscent of 1 Corinthians 10:13 and Ether 12:27, though neither one of those popular scriptures hit this concept more than obliquely, I don't think).

Before I launch into the many scriptures that I have mentally connected to this concept and hit a million tangents and am unable to return, I want to defer my discussion of the Refiner's Fire just long enough to give you some C. S. Lewis:

I love C. S. Lewis. For Easter, my parents gave me a little book of C. S. Lewis quotations, and it comes in oh so handy in pondering Things. I'm afraid, therefore, that I can't make referential hyperlinks here because the book isn't very good about giving me sources.

Anyway, Mr. Lewis says some great things about the purpose of pain in life; I will label them for you:

GOD DISCOMFORTS US TO TURN US TO HIM

God, who has made us, know what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as he leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for While what we call 'our own life' remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make 'our own life' less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible source of false happiness?

GOD WANTS US TO BE MORE LIKE HIM, AND SOMETIMES CHANGE MEANS PAIN

Imagine yourself as a living house, God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is he up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of--throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were 'gods' and He is going to make good His word. If we let Him--for we can prevent Him, if we choose--He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful, but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.

That's pretty intense, when you think about it. Certainly that transformation is going to require more than a little refining--a whole lot of fire and a whole lot of pain--but, in the end, we will have more than was ever required of us. Wonderful thought, that.

But me, I'm not perfect. I make mistakes all the time. Say something about that, Mr. Lewis, I beg.

On the one hand, God's demand for perfection need not discourage you in the least in your present attempts to be good, or even in your present failures. Each time you fall He will pick you up again. And He knows perfectly well that your own efforts are never going to bring you anywhere near perfection. On the other hand, you must realise from the onset that the goal towards which He is beginning to guide you is absolute perfection; and no power in the whole universe, except you yourself, can prevent Him from taking you to that goal. That is what you are in for. And it is very important to realise that. If we do not, then we are very likely to start pulling back and resisting Him after a certain point.

But sometimes we fail, Mr. Lewis; sometimes we feel so all alone! What then?

You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.

Thank you, Mr. Lewis; that will do.

The Refiner's Fire

We all face trials from time to time throughout our lives, but very few have faced the Refiner's Fire more literally than Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego. King Nebuchadnezzar made 90'-tall statue and commanded all his subjects to worship it whenever his little band started playing the worship song, but these three insolent Jewish teenagers refused to do so and were therefore arraigned before the King. He was furious, but he said he'd give them a second chance. "[B]ut if you worship not," he warned them, "ye shall be cast the same hour into the midst of a burning fiery furnace; and who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands?" (Daniel 3:15).

"O Nebuchadnezzar," the said, "we are not careful to answer thee in this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us our of thing hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up" (Daniel 3:17-18).

I love these guys; really, I do. I cannot imagine saying such a thing to a king. Even if I were as determined to avoid breaking the second of the ten commandments as they were, I'm not sure I could put it so boldly. That, my friends, is the quintessential awesome: to say "Suck it yea verily" to the king of the Babylonian empire--man.

[Incidentally, that phrase "But if not" is amazing all on its own and warranted a wonderful address a few years back. You can find that here.]

Anyway, back to the story. Where was I? Oh: "...be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up."

Well, the king didn't cotton to that too kindly. To be honest, he was furious, and I mean downright truculent--"full of fury" the scripture says; h was so mad that he commanded his men to heat the burning fiery furnace "one seven times more than it was wont to be heated" (Daniel 3:19)--so hot that the men who were heating it died--and then he had Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego tossed into that fire (as I understand it, through the chimney).

Then the king, sick man that he was, rubbed his hands together in perverted glee as he sat back to watch (from a safe distance) the death of these rebels.

It was a show he never saw:

"Then Nebuchadnezzar the king was astonied, and rose up in haste, and spake, and said unto his counsellors, Did not we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? They answered and said unto the king, True, O king. He answered and said, Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God" (Daniel 3:24-25).

How Nebuchadnezzar (of all people!) could identify Jesus across the room and through the flames, I haven't the vaguest idea, but this soon-to-be-formerly-pagan king was witness to something both extremely amazing but also (I contend) surprisingly commonplace (at least in the lives of the faithful).

I hope that no one reading this blog is ever condemned to physical death by fire, and I'm not promising that everyone who has faith in Christ would be protected in such a case (in fact, I can think of so many relevant counterexamples that I would feel rather pessimistic linking to any of them, so no parenthetical references here, no sir!), but whenever we are called upon to stand in the Refiner's Fire, Christ doesn't just watch us carefully; He actually stands in the flame with us.

SAVIOR ON BOARD

Remember when Jesus walked on water? The weather was pretty stormy that night, and the Apostles in their boat were "toiling in rowing; for the wind was contrary unto them" (Mark 6:47-48). Jesus could see them from where he was on the land. He could tell they were in trouble, so He went to them (remember "I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you [and] because I live, ye shall live also" [John 14:18-19]?). The most fascinating part of this story to me (the relevant part to what I'm saying) is that He didn't calm the stormy sea from where He was on the land. Certainly He could have. Why didn't He? Well, let's look at what He did:

[A]bout the fourth watch of the night he cometh unto them, walking upon the sea, and would have passed by them. But when they saw him walking upon the sea, they supposed it had been a spirit, and cried out: For they all saw him, and were troubled. And immediately he talked with them, and saith unto them, Be of good cheer: it is I; be not afraid. And he went up unto them into the ship; and the wind ceased...(Mark 6:48-51).

First of all, notice that, until they called out to Him, He made as though He was just going to pass them by. Lesson #1: ask for help!! More important to this discussion, though, is the fact that the waters calmed when Jesus got into their boat. He got in the boat with them! And then the waters calmed.

I actually like John's rendition of the story better: "Then they willingly received him into the ship: and immediately the ship was at the land whither they went" (John 6:21). They let Jesus into their boat, and they were suddenly where they needed to be.

Is Jesus in your boat?

CHRISTMAS PRESENTS

Mary and Joseph had the daunting task of raising the Son of God. When I think of the months leading up to that, I notice some pretty intense suffering. Consider Joseph getting the news that his espoused wife was pregnant. That's not something anyone wants to hear. Think of the shock, the disappointment. Thank goodness that angel came and told him what was really happening! More than Joseph, think of Mary. I can't imagine she made it through that time without at least some negative attention, and then there was that 70-mile journey (maybe longer if they went around Samaria) while she was within days of delivering her first child. And when that Child was finally born, it wasn't in any sort of comfortable or sanitary circumstances but rather among animals in a stable--not pleasant. (For more on these things, check out this article; it's a goodun).

Years later, when Christ was grown, He performed the Atonement. Isaiah tells us that Christ took upon Him our griefs, sorrows, transgression, iniquities, and the chastisement of our peace; Alma adds to this list our pains, afflictions, temptations, sicknesses, infirmities, and sins. Surely He could empathize with Joseph's shock and disappointment and Mary's discomfort and pain. Ours, too. No matter what you're suffering, He can understand and help you through. I am of the conviction that there is nothing so terrible that can happen to us that Christ can't turn it to our good--not just heal us, but actually consecrate our challenges and failings to our ultimate benefit.

CLEAN HANDS AND A PURE HEART

The Atonement brought about grace, which is available to all honest seekers of it. Grace can heal and cleanse us, but it can do so much more, too (check it out).

The ultimate purpose of the Refiner's Fire is to purify. Psalm 24 says that we need clean hands and a pure heart to stand in the LORD's holy place. It is only through the Atonement that this is possible (remember C. S. Lewis's "your own efforts are never going to bring you anywhere near perfection"?), but it is totally possible if we rely on Christ.

David A. Bednar (in this talk) distinguished clean hands from a pure heart, calling clean hands the "forgiveness of sin" and a pure heart "the transformation of our nature" (which hearkens back to Mr. Lewis's living house kinda, doesn't it?). Both are necessary in our journey to be with and like God and Jesus. We can't do it on our own. One of my favorite passages in all of scripturedom is this one in the Doctrine and Covenants. These are the sorts of beautiful words I hope to hear at judgment day:

Listen to him who is the advocate with the Father, who is pleading your cause before him--Saying: Father, behold the sufferings and death of him who did no sin, in whom thou wast well pleased; behold the blood of thy Son which was shed, the blood of him whom thou gavest that thyself might be glorified; Wherefore, Father, spare these [...who] believe on my name, that they may come unto me and have everlasting life (D&C 45:3-5).

CONCLUSION

Sometimes Christian living requires hard things of us, but Christ never requires us to do anything alone. He is always as close as we invite Him to be. And with Christ on our side (or, rather, if we're on His side!), what do we care about hardships? (Take these words from Paul or these ones from Joseph Smith.)

But still it's hard, isn't it? I think it's hard sometimes, but I always find that it's worth it. If we are faithful, it can be said of us as it was said of Alma and his fellows: "the Lord provided [...] that they should suffer no manner of afflictions, save it were swallowed up in the joy of Christ" (Alma 31:38).

Brigham Young said a couple of noteworthy things in this vein--probably more than a couple, but these two are especially good (and I know them):

We rejoice because the Lord is ours, because we are sown in weakness for the express purpose of attaining to greater power and perfection. In everything the Saints may rejoice--in persecution, because it is necessary to purge them [...]; in sickness and in pain, though they are hard to bear, because we are thereby made acquainted with pain, with sorrow, and with every affliction that mortals can endure, for by contact all things are demonstrated to our senses. [....] I rejoice because I am afflicted. I rejoice because I am poor. I rejoice because I am cast down. Why? Because I shall be lifted up again. I rejoice that I am poor because I shall be made rich; that I am afflicted, because I shall be comforted, and prepared to enjoy the felicity of perfect happiness, for it is impossible to properly appreciate happiness except by enduring the opposite (Journal of Discourses 1:359).

Oh, Brother Brigham, how I love you. Give me some more!

I have heard a great many tell about what they have suffered for Christ's sake. I am happy to say I never had occasion to. I have enjoyed a great deal, but so far as suffering goes I have compared it a great many times, in my feelings and before congregations, to a man wearing an old, worn-out, tattered and dirty coat, and somebody comes along and gives him one that is new, whole and beautiful. This is the comparison I draw when I think of what I have suffered for the Gospel's sake--I have thrown away an old coat and have put on a new one. No man or woman ever heard me tell about suffering. "Did you not leave a handsome property in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois?" Yes. "And have you not suffered through that?" No, I have been growing better and better all the time, and so have this people. And you may take the history of the world from the days of Adam down, and I am at the defiance of any historian to prove that the Saints have ever suffered as much as the sinners. This is my belief about the religion of Jesus Christ. Some may say, "Did not the children of Israel suffer?" Yes. "Why?" Because of their iniquity. They transgressed the laws God had given them; they changed the ordinances and broke the everlasting covenant, and for their sin and disobedience they were led into captivity. If they had been obedient, I reckon they would have been led direct to the Holy Land, and stayed there. Some may say, "Now, Mr. Speaker, you have been driven from your home, was it for righteousness?" No, I expect not I expect it was to chasten me and make me better (Journal of Discourses 13:147).

Wow, what a man.

We will suffer. Henry B. Eyring said recently, "Because you are so valuable, some of your trials may be severe." The Lord loves us too much to mollycoddle us, but He will not leave us comfortless. As Journey sang, "Treasures in the jars of clay/Let the light shine out of darkness/Fallen down but not destroyed/It's just another trial by fire."

Ah me! I could go on and on about this, but I think that that's enough for this section.

Closing Remarks

I love Jesus. I know He is my personal Savior. I have come to know Him better as I have sought Him out in my times of sadness and pain. C. S. Lewis said, "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world." But even though God often gives us pain, He has also given us His Son to help us through that pain. ("For God so loved the world..." and "Greater love hath no man than this..." both spring readily to my mind just now.) If we will but strive to stay close to Them, They will do so much more for us than we could ever hope to do on our own. I love Them; I'm so grateful to Them; I pray that all of us will come to know Them better.

Post 131

Last night I watched Intolerable Cruelty with my roommates. It was a good flick; I kinda enjoyed it. The humor was fast and clever but never called attention to itself, so I occasionally found myself thinking, "I think something funny just happened, but I totally missed it." Therefore I feel confident in saying that this movie probably gets better the more times you watch it.

I understand now why Thmazing likes it so much.

More than reviewing the movie, though, I'd like to ramble about some thoughts that've been going round and round in my head of late. [I've never really understood that convention: "of late"? What the heck is that supposed to mean, anyway? Grammatically, I mean. It just seems so archaic. Why do people even use it when we have "lately" at our disposal?] It was funny to me that I had just been out on a long walk, monologuing to myself about a certain topic, and then I came home and watched Intolerable Cruelty, which dealt with that same topic, so now I can talk about it in reference to this movie that I'm pretending to review and no one will know that this movie review is just a pretense and that I'm actually following my own private agenda. Oh! I'm so sneaky.

Anyway, I wanna ramble about the concept of independence. I'ma gonna go out on a limb here and say that the desire to be independent is not a righteous desire, and my comments section is, as ever, wide open for disagreement, dissension, and mudslinging. So. Onward!

In Intolerable Cruelty, Marylin is seeking independence. She spuriously marries wealthy men so she can divorce them and take their money, but she doesn't claim to be a simple gold digger; she says that money means independence, and independence is what she really wants. Marriage and divorce are merely means to get money, and money is merely a means to get independence--and--and--uh....

I give up. Here's what's on my mind:

So many people seem to be driven by a desire to be completely independent, to transcend their reliance on other people and society as a whole, to transcend their reliance on organizations and support groups, and ultimately (in some cases) to transcend their reliance on any sort of Supreme Being. I doubt many readers of this blog would argue that we ought to try to become independent of God, but I think that our delusions of other forms of independence are nearly as crippling.

My parents raised me to become independent--at least, that's what my Mom's always lamenting because, as it turns out, they did a bang up job of it: we kids never come to visit much. I remember a few months ago when a friend of mine told me that she was planning to leave at the beginning of the summer, I was honestly confused.

"Where are you gonna go?" I asked.

"Um. Home," she said, as though I were mildly retarded.

Oh. Why on earth would anyone do that? It just doesn't make sense in my head. I mean, I love my parents, and I'm always happy to see them; I call them every Sunday just to say hello and chat for a while, but I could never go back to living with them! That, to me, would be an indication of regression.

Yet, in the Gospel, we're always talking about sealing all the generations together, and we talk about heaven in terms of families; heck, Joseph Smith said that we'll have the same sociality in the Celestial Kingdom that we have here (D&C 130:2). Furthermore, from a more biological and less theological standpoint, we humans are social creatures; that's our nature even if we are constantly fighting against it.

But I'm not really talking about kids and parents drifting apart. No, it is good and healthy for offspring to leave the nest to build a nest of their own. I'm talking about the lack of trust we have in each other. I know some people who are so guarded that they are little more than a facade; they hide deep within themselves and never let anyone inside to meet them. They build a fortress from the bricks of bad experience with the mortar of pain and set a guard out front. Sometimes the guard is a jester; other times, a brute. Either way, the royal soul inside wastes away, unknown and unknowable. [Little over the top? Hopefully not too much....]

I think I understand solitude better than many people my age. Maybe not, but I like to think I do. My long walks after dark are almost a nightly occurrence; I'm just the sort of guy who needs some alone time on a fairly regular basis. I don't consider myself an antisocial person; I just like my solitude. It's refreshing to walk alone in the middle of the night: my mind clears, I pray aloud, and life starts to make sense.

On the other hand, I know all too well how crippling solitude can be, and I know the pain of isolation. For one who claims to love his solitude, I sure do find myself grappling with intense loneliness a lot, and I find it hard to believe that people who hole up deep within themselves and never let anyone get too close can ever be truly happy. And I worry about those people a lot because I know that, beneath that smooth exterior, a sea of emotion is roiling just below a boil. The thing that scares me most is that, we're all so oblivious to what's inside of people, there's rarely any way to know the time bomb's ticking until it goes off.

I propose, then, that, if we all shot for interdependence rather than independence, we'd all be a lot better off. So, I dunno, like, go give someone a hug, or something, before the whole world explodes.

Post 123

Heeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrre we go!

I just saw Iron Man. My opinion regarding fiction has been in an uproar in the past week or so, and my various thoughts, drifting like silt in a tide pool, have yet to settle, so expect some scatterbrainedness in the following review.

I had a pretty good handle on the premise of Iron Man when I entered the theater, and I told myself that, regardless of what the reviewers were saying, if Tony Stark didn't die in the end, this could not be solid fiction. But superheroes don't die--it runs counter to genre rules (at least in movies)--so I didn't go with high hopes for a tragic end.

SPOILER: Tony Stark does not die.

Poo....

But I really think that the movie would have been solider if he had. I mean, the build up was there from the beginning; throughout the movie, his precarious health is a major issue. I mean, he built the first suit (it seems) because he didn't think that he had much time to live, and he wanted to go out with a bang! Tony Stark needed to die!

But heaven forbid we have a tragic superhero! How on earth can you have a sequel after the hero dies?

Well, there were several options presented in the film itself. I mean, it's always kinda cool to see a sidekick take center stage--makes for a great cliffhanger ending, too. And there's that one scene when Rhodes looks at the original suit and says something whimsical about how he'd like to use it some day. Well, have Tony die and Rhodes take over. It's perfect!

(My favorite option, though, would be to have Tony die and Pepper take over--can you say Iron Maiden?)

Anyway, even though the movie could have been higher quality fiction than what it was, it certainly had its moments. In fact, as far as superhero movies go, this was pretty impressive. I liked a lot of things about it, and I don't think that it would be a complete waste of your time if you went to go see it.

Good enough? Can I stop being nice now?

Good. Because I have more complaining to do....

What was up with the beginning chronology? Was that an attempt at in media res? 'Cuz, if it was, it was a pretty sorry excuse for it! Now, you must understand, I love in media res; I think it's wonderful. I'm all for starting a story in the middle and filling in the backstory as you go. And I kinda like when a story starts at one point and then flashes back, catches up to itself, and move on. Think Hudsucker Proxy: that worked well. Iron Man, not so much. It didn't do a thing for the story. And I have a theory (a bitterhearted theory, of course) as to why.

I'm going through a phase right now that involves an intense disliking for the notion of fiction. I don't like fiction.

Unfortunately, it really isn't that simple because I still like movies. But fictitious books--why on earth would I dedicate the time required to read a book on a book that isn't true? What's in it for me? I really don't think that the cost:benefit ratio is in my favor....

See, I've got this theory--a dream, of sorts--and I hope to one day have the tenacity to pursue it. I think--I really believe--that there are enough obscure, crazy stories in history that, if all we want is whizzbang wow-me's from our books and movies, then fiction ought to step aside. There is no craft in making fictitious wow-me's, and if fiction loses its craftiness, what good is it?

Now, please don't misunderstand. I recognize that aggregate of fiction probably isn't dominated by whizzbang wow-me's, but I fear that sensationalism is becoming too important both in fiction and in the world as a whole.

My discussions on fiction usually end up coming around to D&C 50:23 eventually, so I may as well put it here. The fact of the matter is that I am looking for things that enlighten me and increase my ability to be a worthwhile human being and not for things that simply permit me to escape reality. I have mentioned that I still like movies, and the fact that Charade and Dirty, Rotten Scoundrels are among my DVDs shows that even I enjoy a bit of simple entertainment from time to time, just not all the time.

Now, I realize that my beef may be with the nature of fiction itself. I mean, I assume that fiction has its roots in sensationalism; just look at Beowulf. But fiction has come a very long way from such roots, though I fear that it may be looping back or somehow imploding on itself.

In stark contrast to Beowulf, I suppose, stand the parables of Jesus, in which all story elements are only important insofar as they support the doctrinal message--useful in teaching, yes, but still not really what I'm looking for when I pick up a book from the library.

As I said at the beginning, I am still unsettled on my opinion of fiction; I'm undecided on what I think its place is. But I think that fiction has so much potential that is remaining totally untapped, and it's kinda becoming a lame horse--to me, at least. It seems that human ingenuity is ceasing to be a beast of burden and becoming more like--I dunno--a dancing monkey.

I'm not really that fatalistic--technology boom says human ingenuity is still plenty productive--but I'm just not sure that we create great works of fiction any more. And it makes me sad because, when I want some whizzbang, I never turn to fiction. I have this book that was published, I dunno, like, in the 30s or something. It's called Mademoiselle against the World. It's the autobiographical account of a globetrotting French woman, and it's far more sensational than most over-the-top action-adventure flicks--and it's a true story, which makes it even more sensational! Yet, this amazing story is almost entirely forgotten. Just think of how many stranger-than-fiction stories there must be in the annals of human history! I mean, "identity theft" is a household term these days, but I there are hundreds of pre-1900 instances of identity thieving that are way more exciting than spurious credit card charges--furthermore, I bet they wouldn't be terribly hard to dig up. See, if we just want to be wowed when we walk into a movie theater or pick up a book, writers ought to start probing history for some juicy stuff: just find some obscure story that's really cool and throw it into the public eye.

The task of writing fiction ought to be a lot more demanding than the mass production of cheap thrills--and a lot more meaningful, too. If you're going to feed me a book-long lie, it had better be a good one.