Elder Holland on Lot's Wife, Paraphrasedish

Her attachment to the past outweighed her confidence in the future. In short, she doubted the Lord's ability to give her something better than she already had.

At the risk of repeating myself.

"The sage is full of anxiety and indecision in undertaking anything, and so he is always successful."

This is a quote that I've used before, but I felt like repeating it so that it would be seen/seen again. It's always reminded me of you. Whatever that means to you.

I'm done

I'm done being miserable, thanks for your patience.

It's funny how long it's been since I've had pancakes for breakfast. It's not uncommon for me to think, "Maybe I could make pancakes this morning." But I never do. This morning, for example, I will have cereal again.

Lunch is anyone's guess.

Understanding

Suddenly, I feel like I understand Charles Bukowski a little better. Not his actual poetry, I haven't read that.

You win some, you lose some.

Today, I did some of each. I hope.

Something along those lines

Here we go... Have you ever read the book Frankenstein? By Mary Shelley? I haven't, and I only partially regret that. There are a lot of books out there, and I can only read so many of them in my lifetime. Do you think Eternity will be enough time to read every book? Or will there be an eternal stream of new books being published? This is one of the great questions that must come to haunt each of us at one point or another in our lives. Here's another: If you were a seagull, where would you live? I mean, it's just as cheap to live in Vancouver as it is to live in Costa Azul. Etc. So your choice wouldn't be based on monetary concerns. This may just haunt me for the rest of my life, because I'll never know the answer. And I'll always wonder if maybe I'd be one of those seagulls at Cape Henlopen. And I'll always wonder if I would be a happy seagull at Cape Henlopen. Or would I have doubts about my choice of residence? Would I dream of Miami Beach or La Verkin or Akron at night, and wake up with cold sweats? This will haunt me: do seagulls have cold sweats when they doubt? What about French Fries? Would I eat French Fries as a Seagull?

Here's the frightening thing: These questions are really starting to bother me. Not the French Fries. I really don't give a dang whether I'd eat French Fries or not. I don't really give a dang that French Fries is generally not written with the first letters capitalized. But the other seagull questions are starting to bother me. If I were a Spanish Seagull, I'd be a gaviota. I think I could live with that.

My Greatest Passion

Yesterday, my life changed forever: I rode on a MONORAIL! Among other things... But let me tell you why my greatest passion is: MONORAIL. They go on just one track! They're in the AIR! They're featured in the song Johnny on the MONORAIL by the Buggles!

I didn't take this photograph, but I could have because I WAS ON THIS MONORAIL! Actually, I sort of did take this photograph, but in a different sense than is usually implied when one says that he or she took a photograph. I took it from this web page: MONORAIL!!!

I now know all about the Supreme Court from 1967 to 1980.

You name it, I know it. Or I'll make it up. I can even make it sound pretty convincing.

Best Fourth of July Ever

Take that, October 19

So you remember how I said that Sunday, October 19, 2008 had been one of the best days of my life? Monday, June 22, 2009 beat it hands down. Some of you will eventually know why, I reckon. Others may or may not figure it out.

Let me tell you this, which is completely unrelated:

I'm going to Salem today to vote on the bond election for the Nebo School District. I plan to vote in favor.

Pain and Lilies

I saw pain two times in the desert.

For what am I looking?

I thought it was appropriate for crushed aspirin to fall from my backpack onto the sand. But it wasn't nearly enough. Sometimes the desert reminds me of a song I hate, sometimes it reminds me of immensity, sometimes I cry with those who aren't actually crying. I do not think that they will cry for me.

"When you expect your opponent to yield you should also avoid hurting him." This came in a fortune cookie, written on a fortune. Probably in 2000 or 2001. Have you ever wondered if maybe you are that opponent whom you should avoid hurting? Have you ever wondered if maybe you should have licked up that aspirin despite the sand that would come with it? Have you ever written an essay about love crushed, only to discover you were both mortar and pestle and sand grain and aspirin?

"What's the point of forgetting if it's followed by dying?"

This is my Memorial Day 2009.

National Turtle Wax Gifting Day

Also National Turtle Wax Gifting Day.

National Toaster Gifting Day

May 22, 2009 will be National Toaster Gifting Day. Like a Billiken, it's luckier to receive a toaster as a gift than to buy your own. Luckier still to steal one.

I just ate a lot of guacamole

It wasn't even very good guacamole.

Learning

I just took a survey for seniors about to graduate from BYU. The final question, or one of the final questions, asked for me to describe an experience at BYU that significantly affected how I think about learning. I chose the lab I did last month for my geology class which involved drawing a few lines and coloring, and then counting up sections in which I'd colored both yellow and red. It was a total waste of time, but it got me thinking about how little I've learned in so many classes compared to what I could have learned. I think it comes down to the fact that learning in a university setting is often motivated only by the desire to fulfill a requirement - get a good grade on a lab and in a class, graduate, get into grad/med school, or get a good job. I'm afraid that more often than not, that's why we do assignments and why we go to school. So in the survey I described this and said that if I were to create a university, its mode of operation would be fundamentally different than that of BYU. And that more learning would take place. I'm pretty sure this is true.

I'm not sure that this is exactly the kind of response they had in mind. I hope it is.

I also hope that they give out free hot dogs to encourage me to donate to BYU.

My trip to UC Davis

So it seemed like it might be in order for me to give some sort of report or summary of my trip to the University of California at Davis, from which I returned late Tuesday night. In case anyone's curious, and hasn't heard my report yet. For that reason I began this post, but I've changed my mind, and will instead discuss my trip to Smith's last night. This wasn't a particularly interesting trip, but it's what came to mind.

Here are two things that occurred at Smith's: 1. I went to buy salsa, and decided I didn't want the Pace Picante Sauce, even if it was on sale. Nor did I want Kroger Picante Sauce, which was on an even better sale. Instead I bought the Pace Tequila Lime salsa which was maybe on sale. Maybe not. But it sounded more delicious at the time. 2. I saw some canned beverages in the Foreign Foods aisle, and remembered that Greg was raving about a lightly carbonated all juice canned beverage earlier that evening. I decided to look for such a beverage in order to purchase it. Later, as I was walking through the store, I saw the chilled beverages aisle, which I think mainly includes beer, hard lemonade, and the like. I decided the drink I had in mind probably would instead be with the soft drinks. Then I forgot about it, and didn't buy it. I did see Chili flavored Lindt chocolate at a fantastic Fresh Values price, which I did purchase.

The chocolate might technically be a third thing, because it wasn't really conected to the drink in any way.

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.

Cellular Telephones

Here's maybe the second best thing about Cellular Telephones:

If you want to talk to yourself, but there are other people around, you can pretend to get a call, and then you just have to do a little fake intro conversation and go into whatever it is you want to say. No one will be the wiser, unless you're a really poor actor, and it's obvious that no one actually called you, and then you'll look even weirder because you're not only talking to yourself, but you're pretending to talk to someone else, and even waiting for them to say stuff.

Here's maybe the third best thing about Cellular Telephones:

Rural electrification: seedbed of the unforseen.