I LOVE THIS GOSPEL!!!!

Thoughts from three favorites

Bro. Bott was teaching us today why missionaries are so irresistible. People fall in love with the mantle. They exude love because they are so steeped in the Spirit and God is love (1 John 4:16). He told us a lot of sad stories about elders screwing their lives up because they didn’t understand that girls were only falling in love with the mantle. He shared this excellent McKay quote:

There is one responsibility which no man can evade and that responsibility is personal influence. Man's unconscious influence, unconscious influence, the silent, subtle radiation of his personality. The effect of his words and acts. These are tremendous. Every moment of life he is changing to a degree the life of the whole world.
Every man has an atmosphere which is affecting every other. Man cannot escape for one moment from this radiation of his character. This constantly weakening or strengthening of others. He cannot evade the responsibility by saying it is an unconscious influence. He can select the qualities he would permit to be radiated. He can cultivate sweetness, calmness, trust, generosity, truth, justice, loyalty, nobility, and make them vitally active in his character. By these qualities he will constantly affect the world. This radiation to which I [4] refer comes from what a person really is, not from what he pretends to be. Every man by his mere living is radiating sympathy, sorrow, or morbidness, cynicism, or happiness or hope, or any other hundred qualities. Life is a state of radiation and absorption. To exist is to radiate. To exist is to be the recipient of radiation.

(full address: http://education.byu.edu/mckay/48apr27.html)

Then he said, “You people all think finding a mate is so hard. It’s really not. You sit down and figure out what characteristics you want in your mate. Then you incorporate them into your own personality. Then you just walk across campus and just radiate. D&C 88:40. Write it down. ‘Like attracts like.’ Some of you guys out there like anything that wears a skirt, but not most of you. You attract and are attracted to people who radiate the same characteristics.”

Old Testament was Micah and some 2 Kings. Bro. Merrill says these are some of his favorite, most beautifully tender verses in the Old Testament—Micah 6:6-8:
Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the most high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?
Bro. Merrill’s commentary: “Does God want a lot? No. He wants everything. [I’m hearing some Lewis.] Look at D&C 11:12. Are you all as excited as I am for General Conference? I’m not expecting huge guidance. I’m not expecting to hear the exodus to Missouri announced. But I’m excited…We hear the same things at conference all the time. God isn’t asking us to get on our knees and walk to Kirtland. But in some ways, I think it would be easier to give up all my worldly wealth and walk to Nauvoo.”

How gratifying that great minds sometimes share my thoughts.

We've been discussing suffering in Shakespeare, as found in King Lear, and my teacher had a few good thoughts:
Everyone suffers in the play. How do they all respond? Edmund gets violent and treacherous. Edgar and Kent reach outside of themselves to serve others.
"What is the price of your soul? What does it take to get you all worked up about something to the point that it's all you can think about?"
"You can't suffer meaningfully and move on if you're holding a grudge."
Theme of identity/self-knowledge: You gain knowledge, positive and negative, about yourself, your limits, and your resources, but only after you go through something hard.
"You can't control the world, but you can adopt a more helpful attitude about it. Accept that you're going to experience some senseless suffering. Edgar: 'Men must endure Their going hence even as their coming hither. Ripeness is all.' So many of us have the mindset that 'if I follow the laws and commandments, I am shielded and I will be blessed.'" This is true, to a degree. But it can lead you into a false sense of security and then you're resentful when you do suffer and you miss out on your growth opportunities.

I LOVE LITERATURE!!! I sit there in class and I'm amazed that the discussions we have actually count as school.

Opening Day of Halloween Sock Season

I wear them year round, but I get to make up songs about them in October.
...I'm not...crazy.
Oh no! Two posts in two days! I've tried not to do that...I'd like to make people think I have a life. And I should be studying. But. Whatever.

We were going over King Lear in Shakespeare today. My mind tends to wander when I relearn things I’ve already done, so I was looking for my syllabus to see what other assignments we had to do for the class. It’s too wonderful to just be a purely educational experience, I was telling myself. Everything in my educational experience tells me that you can never just actively absorb knowledge: you have to do silly assignments to prove that you’re paying attention. This tends to kill the joy of learning. It’s like BYU’s Honors program (again, for another post…if I ever decide I want to write about the assininity). But Shakespeare isn’t like that. We have assignments, but I like them. I see the purpose behind them. And they don’t interfere with my learning.
I have a purple 5 subject spiral bound notebook that represents the last two years of my major’s classes. I love it. It’s seen me through 291, 293 (crazy death class), and 314. Now it’s with me in 292 and 382 (Shakespeare). We have a lot of history, this notebook and I. It’s crammed full of frantically scribbled pages, the not uncommon “I HATE AMERICAN LIT” vituperations, marginal doodlings generated in last-ditch attempts to stave off sleepiness, and the cover is scuffed and limp, its corners rubbed round. In short, it is a seasoned and mighty warrior. So as I was going through this timeless and scarred notebook of mine, I flipped to a random page and a thrill shot through my body as a loose sheet of notebook paper shifted in the shuffling: it was covered in the blue ink and column-style layout of one of my famous blank verse poems. (“Famous” here is very tongue-in-cheek: my past writings are most prolifically blank verse because prose is boring to look at and formulaic poetry takes too much concentration. So, essentially, I am a lazy writer, looking for a shot of intrigue in my writing without working for it.) It was an old one. I had ripped it out of some other section and stuck it hastily in its current location. The little hanging, ragged paper tags from the spiral binding were bent at disparate angles and well-creased from the months it spent in the notebook. The spiral binding had rubbed the left edge shiny and gray, and the top, bottom, and right edges were frayed from hundreds of trips in and out of my backpack.
There was no title for the poem. I began to read and remembered the first three lines only, recalling a vague image I had that inspired it in my 8 am writing about literature class (that’s 314. Distant second in crazy death class ranking): I used to make a tick mark for each of the 75 minutes in the margins of my notes to give myself a minute-ly task to keep myself awake. So the first three lines came back quickly to me. But the rest of it I don’t remember writing at all. I obviously did, because it’s my handwriting…and I obviously wrote it early in the morning, while half asleep…but I don’t remember it. As I read it, I had the distinct impression that I had meant completely different things when I wrote it as compared to what I got out of it today—especially that last section. After going over it a few times, I have a pretty good idea of what I originally meant, which is not at all what I interpreted the first time I read it today. That was so exciting. My writing preserved a part of myself and I could witness my growth through comparing the thought processes of both of me’s. The poem was completely free of editing, with no places that I marked out, no altered phrasings or replaced words, so I will put it here as I found it, unedited, weird punctuation and all, not for its artistic merit (though, in truth, I am pretty pleased with how some of it comes out), but because it’s such an exciting discovery for me (despite the well-worked-over theme). And this is my blog.

Every second passed
Builds a store behind us
Depletes the mound before us
Lengthens the path at our backs
into the enveloping haze
Misty vagueness
Not taking our remaining steps away—
Presenting new twists, turns, forks,
No turning back.
Every second step brings us closer to something
Past another, away from another
Cherish each—be the moment.
It was in soul-sucking that I
first heard—“Life is just waiting
around for the next thing
to happen. Death is all we
can count on.” Protect your soul.
Wear a scarf. Go kick through
the leaves. Roll in the snow.
Embrace these other aspects of Self.
The warm, musky essence of Being.
curled within the nest of blankets and sheets
“Shared experience relieves humans
of the loneliness of individual existence.”
Fall into the arms of a like mind,
wrapped around, curled together,
willingly suspend your disbelief,
just for a moment, and see us 2
connected on, not on a wire,
but a silken thread.
Because you knew these words
before I wrote them.

Bruise story—it’s tre-es bonnnn!

I promised them in my very first post, and here it is, at long last: a bruise story. And then some.

I’m waiting for the bishop…he’s about 45 minutes behind in his interviews. So I’m in that room in the MARB we used for testimony meeting second to last week, working on a blog entry. Life is gorgeous. The weekend was wonderful: we’re going over Lear in Shakespeare (Young Shakespeare Company’s production of King Lear is on Thursday and I have some serious misgivings about missing The Office for a 45 minute rendition of Lear geared towards elementary school age kids. I bet they cut out the gouging of Gloucester...and lots of Lear's ravings...especially the part where he curses Goneril's womb into sterility) and my roommates and I were in the ward variety show Friday night. Heidi had someone film it and we watched it until 1 in the morning. It was one of those things that could either go very well or completely tank. I was a little nervous at first, but then I got over it real fast. I enjoyed it. That's new. I've never really enjoyed performing before. My ex-roommate said that she almost wet her pants laughing. That was gratifying. Made me feel warm all over. Our “cast picture” is my new wallpaper; you know something’s good when it replaces Fred and George Weasley.

A skit was probably not the best thing to do right before a date (I had beret hair, a purple eyeliner moustache [that's so ironic to me: I was feminine French person with a man's name and a purple moustache. Funny], and peanut butter all over my face to take care of), but whatever. We doubled with his friend and his friend's girlfriend (it's the second time since I've been here that I've gone with someone I don't know all that well and his friends whom I don't know at all, and his friends always include a lovey-dovey couple, and we go back to someone's apartment and play card games. Must be a Provo thing. But my ranting on BYU-style dating is for another post). Some people from the girl's ward came and recruited for a game of Dots (or Commando, depending on your geographical vernacular). We went and played for two hours at the Marriott Center. It was glorious...rural parkour. Jumping railings, rolling around in the dirt, climbing six foot walls, diving into shadows, dropping from six foot walls (or into six foot tall bushes, as Jason did), and running into trees. Ah. I love it. I was running to the very last base when the Dotmaster (DM if you will...oh, I can feel the hackles rising on that one) stopped counting. I was so close! I hurled myself at the tree and had to stop myself with my left hand. It hurt a bit. The pain increased throughout the night. The little veins in the heel of your hand under your thumb? Mine were black. And it was mad swollen. I had to apply frozen peas and carrots before I could go to sleep. Couldn't open jars the next day. But I won that game. It was glorious. Two hours of unrelenting adrenaline. It's all about knowing your abilities, getting the timing right, and strict self-discipline. And getting the angles right behind your covers. I wasn't caught a single time. My dad would be so proud. Now if I could just parlay such stealth, tactical brilliance, and prowess into laser tag, I'd be set for life. Then we had a freshman ward reunion (just the girls, the guys are still on their missions). 7 girls are married. We reveled in engagement stories and other love life tales and such. It's amazing, the older we get, the more mature our conversations. And I mean that in all senses of the word. Then I got to go to the Relief Society broadcast on a chartered bus and with a crafty little sack lunch. (Post break for the interview. My bishop said his wife was “just roaring” all during our skit. Half the ward quoted it to us today. We ARE famous. Back to post.) My roommates and I reminded me of those early Church history pioneer women who put on their bonnets and headed out to their meetings. We were on a chartered exodus to Salt Lake. All I can say is that I love being a woman in this church. I loved that conference. But the 6 hours of unmitigated estrogen…I wasn’t sad to see it end. It SNOWED yesterday and it was cold so I got to wear my red flannel PJs last night. Happiness is flannel PJs. (“I wear my pink pa-ja-mas in the sum-mer when it’s hot…”)

The only thing I can complain about this weekend is really gross. I was on a sugar craving all week long and I felt guilty about it. Then I found out I was completely justified. So instead of beating myself up, I embraced it. I needed to break a twenty so I could get quarters because my tires need air, so Friday afternoon before the variety show, I went to the gas station next to my complex and got a pint of Haagen Dazs butter pecan. I was a little paranoid to carry ice cream past my entire ward’s apartments, because everyone thinks they know what it means when someone at BYU buys ice cream. I went back to studying Steve Martin in The Pink Panther and eating my butter pecan. It was weird: half of it was creamy, half of it was all crystallized and gross. I didn’t have time or attention to spare to figure out what the deal was. I just wanted ice cream. I ate a quarter of it. Next day I had it out and before I ate it I was expressing my disappointment in the quality of “kitchen friendly” Haagen Dazs. I described it to her as seeming freezer burned. Then I thought, “Crest is a dirty little convenience store. I bet it IS freezer burned.” So I turned it over and read: “Best purchased by 4-13-07.” I almost died. 5 ½ months past the sell-by date. Disgusting. I feel really dirty now. If I die in the next week, you all know the reason. In my sock drawer, there's a treasure map that leads to the hiding place of my final will and testament. It's marked with an X.

By the man to whom I owe my love of words:

Background: San Francisco refused to let the Marine Corps film a recruiting video there...no, wait, they COULD, so long as no Marines were in the commercial.
http://www.theacru.org/blog/2007/09/marines_denied_right_to_film_in_san_francisco/
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1901695/posts

Email response:
(The S/F means "Semper Fi.")

Subject: A letter to the leader of a bastion of tepid souls

Gentlemen, I put fingers to keyboard and let the following flow. I wrote it with the intention of sending it to the mayor of SF, and thought you might enjoy the read.
S/F
Russ
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Sir, I applaud your decision not to allow my brothers-in-arms access to your city. I support fully your freedom to be who and what you are. Furthermore, I am pleased to see that you recognize that your city is unworthy to presence such men. As such, do not expect to see me, my family, or any of my friends support your unpatriotic, non-supportive city, either. Until you and your ilk no longer represent the will of San Franciscans, and are duly voted out of office, your city will remain that: your city, not mine.

It seems time and distance work wonders; 911 is most likely just the emergency number in your city. For a lot of us, 911 was a wakeup call that your constituency seems to have forgotten. Rest assured, our enemy has not forgotten about your constituency. How do you expect Marines to come to your rescue, but not to your city?

The only thing that gives me hope for our future as a nation is the rising generation of great Americans that are currently getting their training in civic responsibility within the hallowed halls of the Armed Forces of this grand nation. They will replace the cold, callow, self-serving politicians and cronies that currently darken the doors of our public institutions.

As I have your ear, let me share a thought, eloquently expressed by one of my favorite presidents, Theodore Roosevelt. In his speech, we find this now-famous excerpt: "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who "but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier.""
-- From "The Man in the Arena" given at the Sorbonne, Paris, France, April23, 1910

It is for this reason that I still hold great hope for America, because"There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder." Today, men and women who wear the uniform of this magnificent nation know these "great and generous emotions."

At some point in the future, San Francisco may become infected with such enthusiasm. Until then, it must remain a bastion of tepid souls, unworthy of the presence of great and generous Americans like the Marines you did not allow to have access to your city. Keep up the good work.

By the way. That's my Dad. :D

A Celebration of "Sundry Sonnets"

I'm changing my Sonnet. Now it's 43. We had to read these random sonnets for Shakespeare today. I should have known my professor wrote them. You really have to have heard him talk to get the proper inflection that just adds to the hilarity. This guy named his son Lear. He's written 1,100 sonnets. 1,100!!! He wanted to write one a day for a year because he'd heard someone else did, then he got on a roll and did it for 3 and a half years. I really like him. I do believe I shall name my firstborn son Gideon, to pay homage. Here, I share the joy:

White Chocolate
White chocolate, oh oxymoron foul!
No cocoa bean did bless your candy vat.
We chocoholics taste you and we howl.
What are you? An albino slab of fat,
Hydrogenized and sweetened past remorse
Then peddled with hyperbole and fraud
To unsuspecting chocophiles of course
Who'd rather gargle liver oil from cod.
I've gnawed on better plastic in my day!
More flavor can be found between one's toes!
Perverse confection, fit to throw away
Unworthy of my chocolate sniffing nose
White chocolate, a joke not semi-sweet
Your coming means our end is near complete.

Love's Lungs
Back then balloons were not an easy matter.
In ancient times they had to kill a goat,
Extract its large intestine (or its bladder),
Some lumberjack would huff, the ball would bloat.
Today some wealking florist turns the gas,
And presto, a bouquet of mylar orbs!
Farewell to those rites of manhood to be passed
When gifts so swelled no time nor sweat absorb.
True valentines their own balloons must fashion,
Must find a cow or rhino to dispatch,
Must find the guts to well express his passion,
To show his love that florist's met his match.
She'll know your love by just how well you blew:
Believe me, this procedure's tripe and true.

Spam
Third cousin to a pig and twice removed,
It oozes, goopy, from its squarish tin;
Thick film conceals the lard with which its grooved,
Intestines pureed mottle its pink skin.
Would ancient man have glorified the spam,
In pictographs preserved its conquest sure?
Or would they shrug at its smoot texture, bland--
No boxy graphic to make spam endure?
In industry the spam is thrift itself:
No bones or organs spill aside as scrap.
Once salted, lives for decades on a shelf;
Discerning palates know its kind from crap.
Maligned, despised, yet all the while consumed
If spam's eternal, earth itself is doomed.

Shop Vac: A Sonnet
No kitten Kirby I, no devil red;
Such toys are made for sniffing dainty dust
A shop-vac I, by two horse powers fed
Inhaling concrete boulders is my lust.
Beware, don't leave your children in my reach
Nor in my range allow the family mutt.
Wet gunk or dry, my nuclear nozzle's speech
Persuades all matter enter in my gut.
Does gravel, nails, and muck fill your garage,
Embarrass you and cause no end of danger?
What if a stray ten-penny nail did lodge
Deep in the insole of some passing stranger?
If Santa brought you me, he brought you luck,
The present that will always, gladly, suck.

Mucus (not a good one to read over breakfast)
Lugubrious and patient as he slimes
His dark and viscous weight within my head.
He tugs his bitter taffy mass in crimes
Of pressured pain and dripping dread.
A hundred tissues bruised with blasting blows,
And yet he lingers, stranding strands of crust;
Gelatinous stalactites, grainy flow,
Replacing brains with miles of muck and must.
In sour thickness smears my throat and lungs,
His wiggling jelly clogs each passageway
I cough up gooey golf balls on my tongue;
I rasping pleas my alveoli pray.
My phlegmy enemy, you shall not run:
With antihistamines I end your fun.

Goodbye, My Love
I trusted you and now it's torn apart:
My happiness, and worse, my trusty truck.
You broke my new transmission and my heart,
And now cash skeedaddles with my luck.
Oh, Cherry, one part reckless, one part divine
You turned my motor once I do confess
But now there is the matter of this fine--
I'm dubious our gears again will mesh.
The wilted pistons are as good as dead
And so is my affection, dear, it's true
I picture your sweet face beneath my tread
These things aren't fixed with kisses and some glue.
Forget the church, I'm going off to Napa
And as for you and me--it's in the crapper.

-Gideon Burton (who, upon my recitation of Sonnet 73, asked me if I'd acted before. Good teacher.)

Enjambment staves off the sing-songy quality of rhymed and metered poetry

I purged on Saturday. Wrote some sonnets. And then I went and lived. I started temple prep lessons with the bishop yesterday. That was the happiest and lightest I’ve been in seemingly forever. Affirmations like that keep me going. Today is perfect: blue skies, no smog, and snow on the mountains. I’ve reconnected with my guys from winter. They bring joy to my inner tomboy. Life is beautiful. I love my ward. I just needed to stop pity-partying with myself and get involved with them. I’m actually giving of myself to them. No more corazón espinado. FHE was crazy fun and I love them. I realized I’ve been pouty, pining for a life that is not (ie, EFY-less campus, etc).
Screw that. Life is beautiful and I love it.
Expectations are preconceived resentments.
On, Teb. On.