His breathing turns a wheel

I'm thinking that one of the coolest moments in President Obama's life this year had to be when he looked at the calender and saw Presidents' Day and realized it's now his day too. If you catch my meaning.

I think my brother knows this kid.

Here's one of the most hilarious things I've ever heard/seen involving a stranger on a bicycle that may be someone my youngest brother knows:

So I'm walking up the long hill/ramp at the south end of BYU campus - the one divided between pedestrians and cyclists - and it's snowing. This was yesterday early afternoon, just a little before 2 pm, and when I'm maybe 100 feet from the top of the hill, a kid on a bicycle starts down it on the other side. He's remarkable in that he's got a bass violin (double bass) in a soft bag over his shoulder and is carrying it behind his back in this manner while riding his bicycle. I've seen him before, and I always think this looks a little ridiculous and rather dangerous. But right as he's gaining speed heading down the hill with his string bass on his bicycle into the snow, I hear him say (and I don't think he was trying to say this to me but was talking to himself - which wouldn't surprise me from the kind of person who carries a bass violin on a bicycle), " I can't see." And then he weant speeding down the hill squinting to try and keep the snow out of his eyes, and wobbling a little. I found this absolutely hilarious.

Here's the essay in it's final form, which I'll be reading next Friday at the English Reading Series at noon in the HBLL auditorium. If you don't read it now, and come on Friday, it will be more of a surprise. I'd recommend reading it and skipping Friday, but that's your call.

Love is Like Grinding Soil

Love is like grinding soil. This thought came to me last week while I spent an afternoon doing just that - grinding soil samples. It's a time-consuming task, it requires great care, it can become tedious, and it gets a little dirty. But there are occasional moments throughout when the ways in which shades of red and rich browns and near blacks contrast with a creamy-colored mortar and pestle cause sudden waves of inspiration, scatter sudden drops of beauty, incite sudden floods of joy. Add to that the eventual rewards – satisfaction, knowledge, and eight dollars an hour – and the parallels to love are numerous and obvious. Or at least this is what I imagined as my arm tired from beating away to crush grains of sand into a floury powder.

The analogy is, of course, ridiculous. Although there are two or three similarities, it's difficult to imagine two things more dissimilar than love and soil grinding. But somehow the comparison, for a brief moment, seemed apt to me. And after a little thought and a little research, I've discovered I'm not alone in using analogies to try to pigeonhole love by tying it to something a little more concrete – like a mortar and pestle, or a pigeon hole. It seems, as a culture, we tend to talk more about what love is like than we talk about what love really is.

Search for "love is" in a database of pop music lyrics, and you'll quickly see what I mean. If we can believe pop musicians (and when it comes to love, why wouldn't we?), then love is a losing hand, a losing game, just a game, a contact sport, and a blood sport. Love is a battlefield, camouflage, and war. Love is the holocaust, a killer, a cannibal, it is dead (but also living and life) and it's a life-taker. Love is like cancer, the cure, bad medicine, drugs, a cigarette, and heroin. Love is like a shooting star, tears from the stars, and brighter than the brightest star. It's wider than the sky, and like the wind, or the sun that comes out after the storm, or a cloud, or the rain and the sea. Love is a shining sea, an ocean, a river, a flood, a tidal wave, a heat wave, the seventh wave, all seven wonders, just a myth, just a lie, no big truth, nothing but the truth, the law, a higher law, a crime, but also not a crime. And love is hate.

Beyond these relatively simple comparisons, however, there are some even more creative analogies: according to Bo Burnham love is like a homeless guy "finding a bag of gold coins and slowly finding out they're all filled with chocolate;" Jewel compares love to barbed wire flowing through her veins; and who among us can forget what Dean Martin taught - when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that too is love.

So maybe my soil grinding analogy wasn't too ridiculous after all. In fact, it may even be an improvement on many analogies to love. It's certainly an improvement on some of the other analogies I've written. For example, in high school I was asked to write a love song. In it, I compared love to dead plums hanging from a dead branch and a freezer full of ashes buried in my back yard. More recently, I wrote a love poem in which the object of my affection was represented by a dead sea lion washed up on the beach. The sea lion, and the poem, met their ends in flames – a pyre of simile and metaphor.

Maybe examining my own analogies to love is the best way to shed some light on why these are more than just a ubiquitous feature of bad poetry, but also a spreading societal phenomenon. (Whether it's spreading like a flood or like cancer I can't say.) I've chosen to create these analogies mostly because I don't know how to accurately describe what love is. In fact, I don't even know what love is. But I do know a little about some of its attributes: love is a many splendored thing, but it's also terribly complex, and it's understood first in the heart. That is, I know that love is hard to explain. So I've dodged that bullet altogether by not even attempting to explain love, but instead explaining something that might be vaguely similar to it. And as a result, a battlefield, a cannibal, and dirt in a mortar and pestle become love.

Another possible explanation for why we use analogies to describe love is that not only can the analogy allow us to pretend to convey meaning, but it can also allow us to disavow that meaning if it isn't well received: "You thought I was comparing you to a dead sea lion? Why on earth would I ever do that?"

There might be other more substantial explanations for why we use analogies to love. It's possible that these analogies actually explain facets of the diamond that is love in a way that nothing else can. It's possible that they convey emotions felt on the roller coaster of love that are otherwise inexplicable. Maybe analogies add beauty and depth to the poem of love. Maybe they've got some actual literary merit.

This is evidenced by the fact that such analogies aren't limited to pop music. They've also been used by some literary heavyweights: Rochefoucauld said that true love is like ghosts, Charles Bukowski wrote a collection of poetry titled "Love is a Dog from Hell," Emily Brontё compared love to the wild rose-briar, T. W. Robertson described love as being like red-currant wine, and even Shakespeare wrote that "Love is like a child, That longs for everything that he can come by."

There's a good chance, however, that these examples prove less about the validity of analogies than they prove that even supposedly great authors have chosen to dodge a few bullets themselves. Maybe all this proves is that Shakespeare, too, was a cop-out.

Looking at the dozens of lyrical and poetic analogies to love, as well as my own analogies, I have no idea what any of them really mean. To say that love is like an ocean sounds nice at first, but does it really make any sense? How much does love really resemble a giant body of salt water? And if love is really like an ocean, then is it becoming more acidic because of increased carbon dioxide emissions?

Red-currant wine paints a nice image of love, but Mr. Robertson himself would have to admit it's a bit of a stretched illustration. Maybe he came up with that one after drinking a couple too many glasses of the stuff.

And maybe Mr. Martin had some sort of epiphany while picking bits of tomato sauce and pepperoni from his eyelashes, but he's left the rest of us baffled.

Comparing love to dead plums may be terribly romantic, but does it really have any connection to truth?

If I learned one thing from my eleventh grade English Class, it's that all analogies are false. Maybe, given that, love is like an analogy. Except it's true. And maybe, given that, an analogy is the best possible device to explain love.

In the end, whatever the reason we use analogies when we talk about love, it's a part of our culture that's not about to disappear. Love is such a devastating and engulfing enigma, such a strange and beautiful beast, that it seems to demand the comparisons.

You see, using an analogy to explain love is like finding yourself in Rome without knowing a word of Italian, and you desperately want to communicate, but can't. Instead, you have to trust in a stranger you meet, who nods when you ask if she understands English, to explain to the museum guard that the ancient vase was already shattered on the floor when you entered the room. The analogy is the stranger, the person you so desperately love is the guard, and your love for her is on the ground, crushed into a thousand shards.

Crushed like a bad analogy under the foot of a heartless English teacher.

Crushed like grains of sand in a mortar and pestle.