State Fair and EdX

It had been a while since I’d been to a state fair.  The last one I remember going to was actually in Oregon, and that was either in the summer before my junior year or senior year of high school—I really can’t remember which.  They had cool exhibits, my parents bought a couple of “massage guns” (I don’t know what the proper name for it is, other than “life-changing”) and I ended up getting a bowl at the dime toss station.  It was ridiculously fun.

I also remember that it was incredibly pricey and since I’ve lived on my own, I haven’t found the state fairs to be worth my dollar.

I have amazingly generous friends who not only offered to give me a ride there (so I didn’t have to worry about gas or parking costs), but offered to pay my ticket (which also doesn’t come cheap.)  I felt guilty about taking advantage of their friendship (though not enough to say “no” because that’s the kind of person I am) but in the end, they only had to worry about the ride.  When we got to the ticket, right before we got up to pay, a young girl (about high school age, if I had to guess) came back saying she and her friends had an extra ticket and asked if we would like one.

You have to love those little gifts in life.  This kid wasn’t prompted by any reason other than good will; and finding myself surrounded by good friends and random acts of kindness from strangers, I have a lot more faith in humanity and the future than is perhaps sane, but there you go.

                        ***

WalMart has a pretty cool selection of scented candles.  Why was I going through scented candles?  As spotless as I keep my floor, you can tell that my bedroom is a guy’s room.  Some mornings, I forget to take out the trash or I should have done the laundry sooner, but whatever the case is, it could smell better in there.

For only $5, I was able to get a huge honking container of Hazelnut Cream, which is not too sweet yet still makes me hungry.  It’s just right.

                        ***

Last year, I did a post on TedTalks, and at the time I mentioned how I enjoyed the variety and ideas that they promoted.  And considering the short length of each, I was just enough to get an idea of what’s going on in our world.  I still stand by that, but I must confess that nearly a month after I wrote that blog, I stopped watching them.

It’s not that I find it any less valuable; I just got bored.  For me, the great thing about education is that it’s a two-way discussion between teacher and student, or speaker and audience.  I’m not only interested in what I’m being told but also in what I can personally contribute.

TedTalks are a one-way street.  When they weren’t advertising a specific product or idea, I just felt like I was only being talked at.

One of the reasons I love the Khan Academy is that not only do I watch videos, but there exercises that I can use for practicing the skills that are taught, but there are discussion forums for each individual topic, if I so choose.

But onto stuff that’s also free, I have learned about EdX, and what’s available there is stunning.  www.edx.org is a site featuring classes from MIT, Harvard, Wellesley, and a couple other prestigious universities, all for free.

I’ve done online courses before—in fact, they made up half of the total classes I took when I went to college.  I’m very familiar with the teaching style and I’m motivated enough to make it work.

The best part for me are the lectures.  Not only do I get to watch videos from some of the best teachers, and I can also write what they’re saying on my steno machine and get extra practice there as well.  When I told my mom this, she summed it up beautifully, “You’re getting an education on top of your education.”

I’m currently taking a Justice class and an Ancient Greek Heroes class, both from Harvard.  I started too late to get any sort of certificate of mastery from these classes, but I still get to watch the lectures, read the material, and participate in the discussion forums.  For me, this is a straight win all around.  So happy that this was made available.  And thank you to The Colbert Report for bringing this to my attention.  This was by far the coolest thing that show has ever done for me.

Economy and Ender's Game

My parents did a pretty good job educating their kids.  As good as they could, anyway.  I won’t lie, they had pretty rough material to work with.  It took a lot of sanding before they realized we were nowhere close to smooth and had to find something new to polish us up.  They often had to explain themselves and repeat the same lesson three times a day for a month before it’d stick in our heads… and we still likely would do exactly what they told us not to do.

Whenever I think of the effort they put on me, I can’t help but realize how easy I have it being single and childless.

One thing that did stick was how to manage our money.  It took a lot of consistency and patience on their part, but we learned the value of the dollar.  We had the allowance, taught to work and how to save, how to write a check, manage our funds, always pay our debts and bills, and invest in what will last.  And then they let us do whatever we wanted with our money and they sat back and prayed we’d wise up before we started living on our own.

We didn’t.

But this post is actually not about personal finances or even my parents teaching.  This is actually about what my school should have done a better job of:  economy class.

The economy is loosely about finances, but only loosely.  Personal finances is just about your survival and well-being; the economy is about society as a whole and how to take care of the most people with limited resources.

Thing is, there are very few people who understand the economy, the relationship between the government and the market, the difference between cost and price, and why some systems work and others don’t.  Many, if they think about the economy at all, it’s generally as a reaction to what’s been reported in the news and whether it’s affecting their paycheck.  There is often misunderstanding about why things happen the way they do.  And I have been part of that group for the longest time.

It was not my economy teacher’s fault.  She was very good and very smart, and she did her best with the resources she had.  Trouble is, she wasn’t given enough.  In California, at least, schools are given only one semester to teach the economy, and that during senior year, when it’s getting late to teach a whole new field of study to the students.

The purpose of educating children is to help them become productive and useful citizens in your society, and in a democracy, part of that is making sure they are well-informed so that when it comes time to vote and/or work in the private or public sectors, they understand the full implications of their decisions.  Knowing the economy is critical and requires at least two years of study if you want to make sure something sticks with the rising generation.  That, and I think studies should begin in freshman year.

Until somebody gets a clue, though, let me recommend Thomas Sowell’s amazing book, Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy.

I normally wait until I’m finished with a book until I recommend it, but after just barely getting halfway through, it has more than deserved my shouts of approval, early or not.  Sowell tackles everything from what the economy is, to the reasons for and actual results of government regulations, why prices are not the same thing as actual costs, how and why statistics are often misunderstood and misused, and why money itself is used as a means of distributing wealth.  I recently finished the chapter on insurance, how it works and why we have it, and that alone has been worth my investing the time to read it.

                        ***

I reread Ender’s Game for the fourth time, and that is a book that only seems to get better with each return.

Orson Scott Card touched on something valuable in this painful tale of war and leadership.  Ender is a most tragic figure, and yet I wanted to be him when I first read this book in high school.  I bought it as soon as I could and promptly loaned it to anybody foolish enough to ask me about it.  I lost that copy after the first dozen or so had it and had to buy another, which is currently being read by a friend.  This book refuses to stay on any of my bookshelves.

And that’s just the way I like it.  If you haven’t read it before and we happen to run into each other, ask me about it and I will loan it to you.  And if you happen to lose this copy, no worries!  It just means I get to buy another copy to lend out.

New Crush, Internet, and Too Much Food Network

I have a celebrity crush.  I really did not see that coming.  I think the last time this happened was in high school, back when puberty was still the governing force in my life.  Since then, I’ve never really cared.  Famous and/or semi-famous people are often too attractive to believe, but after ten seconds of staring at a gorgeous woman on screen or a magazine cover, I move onto something more interesting.  After all, it’s not like I’m ever going to meet them, and even if I did, a good percentage of them I am convinced would be pills.

Then I found Lindsey Stirling on YouTube and my life may never be the same again.  It was a completely random discovery, too.  I was watching Imagine Dragons music video of “Radioactive” (which is bound to be one of the best songs that ever comes out in this decade) and I noticed a link to a cover version of the same song performed by Lindsey Stirling and Pentatonix.  That cover is just as good as the original and I got curious to follow these people.

Pentatonix is a fun group of talented musicians, but Lindsey Stirling is incredible.  She’s a violinist that has combines her playing with dancing and makes some pretty entertaining videos.

Naturally, she’s gorgeous and her dancing is pretty cool.  And beyond that, she has some genuine talent.  I’ve always stringed instruments.  I love the way they sound and the emotions that they stir.  I’ve always found violins to be the most passionate instrument, even beating the piano, and if I were to go back to playing music and learning a new instrument, the violin or something similar would be my pick.  And Stirling plays very well.  The stories on her videos are creative, the music has energy, and her personality comes through with every song, which is quirky, heartfelt, generous with her collaborators, and absolutely joyful in what she does.

Check her out.  Talent like hers is worth the time.

                        ***

I spent a lot of time whining about the internet while I was at my parents’ place, which I’m positive they didn’t appreciate although they didn’t try to disagree with me.  It’s not that it was really all that terrible; I could still get on and do stuff.  I really only had trouble when I wanted to watch movies on YouTube, Hulu, or Netflix (these three together form an alliance threatening to take over all my available time and succeeding quite well.)

Much as I missed being with my folks, I was excited to come back to where the internet is fast and available.

And for the first two days back, my computer just wouldn’t connect while I was at home.  If it wasn’t for my school’s internet, I never would have gotten last Tuesday’s post up on time.  When I finally stopped having trouble with the internet at home, though, the internet at school decided to take a sabbatical and continued to give me grief the rest of the week.

At least the internet at my parents’ place was consistent.  Consistently slow, but I could depend on it.  Over here, I don’t know what to expect anymore.  I’ve walked into a dark place, where I don’t know what’s going on, I have no guide, and at school, I am forced into listening to my normal dictation tapes the entire time I’m there.  The agony!

Really, this portion is not meant to be an apology for my complaints.  Those still stand.  Still, given my troubles, they no longer have to feel like it's just them.

                        ***

I used to roll my eyes whenever a food program came on.  A show could easily last for an hour, watching other people cook and plate food that you can only look at, but not smell or taste (which is the main purpose of cooking good food.)  This look and don’t touch distressed me so that I couldn’t bear to sit through these programs.

Part of the reason why I ended up liking Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares is because the show is not really about the food, but it’s about the restaurant business and the people who choose that life.  It fascinates me and I’ve learned a great deal about what makes this business work.

My roommate had the TV set to the Food channel last Saturday, and like the slug I am, I was watching it a full hour after he left the room.  Got to see some very interesting restaurant shows that I was not expecting, with mixed results from me.

Restaurant: Impossible has the same sort of pattern that Kitchen Nightmares does.  Robert Irvine goes into failing restaurants and turns them around, only Irvine pushes himself to fix the restaurants in two days and a limited budget.

Irvine struck me as a pro, somebody who really knew what he was doing; and an interesting aspect to the show was the restaurant makeover.  Ramsay usually does a remodel when the restaurants are stuck in the dark ages, but you get about ten seconds (at most) of watching his team doing an overnight miracle.  Restaurant: Impossible spent nearly half the show focused on what Irvine’s team did, from ripping up and putting in new walls to painting to the flooring.  It was almost like seeing something from HGTV.

At the end, Irvine did a lot of good for the restaurant, but unfortunately, it was not a pleasant viewing experience.  I just couldn’t help noticing the difference between his approach and Ramsay’s approach.  From the start, Irvine was embarrassing the owners in front of their customers, when revamping the menu, he was constantly showing off, and what really got me was how he kept saying “I.”  “I am not putting my name on a failure,” he said at one point, and it was a constant stream of “I am doing this” and “I am doing that.”  He is doing a lot of good, but it comes off like he’s doing this for his own ego as much as for the owners.

I compare that to Ramsay.  When he criticizes the food, he’s very careful to go in the kitchen or keep the conversation private, away from the customers.  I’ve seen an episode where he kicked out the camera crews so he could talk to the owners alone.  The only times he’s ever purposely embarrassed the owners before the customers is when they have let the kitchen fall so low that it has become a health hazard and the owners need an overdue wakeup call.

But except for advertising, changing the menu, and making organizational changes, Ramsay is very hands off.  He wants the restaurants to succeed, but he wants it to be their success.  I’ve never seen him say, “I’m going to do this.”  He always says “we.”  It is an ego thing for him.  He comes in as part of a team and he’s there to help them make their restaurant a success, but the success and failure lies with the owners and their team.

I would rather spend time in Ramsay’s company just from that show than I would with Restaurant: Impossible.

I was also introduced to a couple shows that have their own patterns: Mystery Diners and Restaurant Stakeout.  Both shows follow a similar pattern.  Restaurant owners are losing money and they suspect problem with their employees but can’t find out exactly what is going wrong.  So the diners or “Willie” Degel (whichever show you’re watching) set up hidden cameras in the restaurant and observe everything that’s happening in the restaurant and pinpoints the exact problems.

Mystery Diners was fun.  The diners feel like just a bunch of regular guys performing an invaluable service for restaurant owners in a rut and can’t figure out why.  All the diners do is pinpoint the problems and let the boss do what they want to do with that knowledge.

Restaurant Stakeout is actually the more entertaining of the two.  Degel is a pro; he’s smart, savvy, no-nonsense, and if I had a business, I would trust him with it.  Watching it is kind of painful, though, because as my roommate pointed out, Degel is a diva.  The whole time I watched this program, I felt that this show was all about him first and the restaurant second.  I learned a lot about business just from one episode, but I’m not eager to watch another episode.  His pride kills me.

Once I got off the couch and away from Food Network, I told myself that I had to get a life.  That I’ve just spent so much time talking about it is proof that I haven’t met that goal yet.

Texas!

So in a fairly brassy move, Governor Rick Perry has been putting up radio ads in other states to encourage businesses to move to Texas.  His targets included Illinois, California, and New York (and on that one, Lewis Black did not take it lying down.)  Needless to say, the few people who actually listen to political ads have taken offense to this guy coming into their house and telling them their place sucks.  It's a bit like the guest dissing your rambunctious sibling.  Sure, you make fun of him to his face and rant about him when he’s gone, but as soon as some stranger starts talking trash about him, all you want to do is kick the stranger’s butt out the door.

Now, I’m a Californian through and through.  I was born here, raised here, and have kvetched about this stupid place all my life.  But man, after our state graciously accepts Governor Perry’s money and gives him air time, and as our guest he feels himself duty bound to tell us we suck… boy, that really sticks in my—

—okay, I don’t actually care.  Most folks in the internet can get into a pissing match about Perry’s presumptuous advertising, but frankly, he’s symptomatic of the unbelievable Texas pride.

Before I moved to Texas, I was aware of the incredible sense of self-worth Texans place in their stretch of dirt.  The job I held before I moved had half their managers from the Lone Star State, and shouts of, “This one’s from Texas!” resounded at least once an hour, often as they put together the California-style burger.  But this was just a small group.  Surely, they did not represent their whole state’s population.

Boy, was I ever wrong.

What I discovered in the first month of living there is that the children are trained from elementary school to have Texas pride.  Their state history is given equal priority with national history, and taken to heart more than lesser subjects like English.

And it is taken to heart.  The residents there have shown more passion for their state than I have ever shown for Jesus.  The true Texan extols the virtues of their land, preach of its greatness to the mass of those blindly staying in the 49 other worthless states, and the teach this message in their homes to their families, friends, and unwitting guests who came for dinner, little knowing it wasn’t their stomachs gorging on that sweet, sweet barbecue that fed them, but the nourishment of the good word of “everything’s bigger in Texas” that brought lasting peace to the soul.

It’s clear to me that Governor Perry has been misunderstood by the media and those irate souls following the message.  Perry’s not making an economic power play; he’s proselytizing his true faith, and under our First Amendment, you cannot mess with another man’s religion.  He, like thousands of other residents, knows it to be America’s shining beacon and the site of their eternal home.

Having been among so many believers, I’m completely on board.  Texas clearly is the best place in all the world, and out of the two years I lived there, I ought to be able to tell you the reason why.  Heck, many of the residents have been their entire lives, including the second generation of its sizeable illegal immigrant population.  Surely they could tell me why it was great.  One lady who invited me to dinner said, “I don’t where you’re from but I’m just going to let you know that your state’s got nothing.”

Who was I, a mere guest, to disbelieve?  But when pressed for a reason, the average stand-by is “everything’s bigger here.”  Well, this seemed to be true; biggest capitol building in the nation, biggest football fervor, biggest egos, and the biggest Christian church buildings I have ever seen in my life.

But is that all?  Well, according to the doctrine, bigger is better.  After all, it is the biggest state and that means it has to the bes—wait,  I apologize.  I did some quick research and it turns out that Alaska actually smoked Texas in that field by over 390,000 square miles.

Well, that doesn’t mean anything.  You can have a lot of land but that land doesn’t do you squat unless you’ve got people living on it.  And with Texas having the largest population… I’m sorry.  A brief overview of the national census in 2010 and the population estimates in 2012 both show that California has approximately 12,000,000 more people  residing there than Texas.

Oh, this is just man-made things, and with the population, that will change.  This only means they have to change the wording a little bit, as in “everything will be bigger in Texas.”  But in the meantime, they still have plenty to boast of.  After all, you can’t find deserts bigger than in Texas.

Okay, fine, I’m just being mean.  The Great Basin shouldn’t even count, since it covers more than one state and none of them within Texas borders.  You’d think the environment would no better than to waste its time with Nevada, Utah and those other silly southwestern nerd states.  Texas gets plenty of its crazy, humid weather, ranging from “hot as hell” in summer to “hell froze over and took my balls with it” in winter.  That it shares the same condition with the rest of the South and Midwest means nothing.

But going over my list, I really felt that Texas ought to be standing out a lot more than it was.  With a history has brash as the people themselves, something should stick out that beats all others.  They have the Alamo, which everybody talks about but no one outside Texas can recall whether the Alamo was a place or the name of the mythical herd of bison prophesied to once again roam the plains of the American country.

They could claim being the site of the most notorious presidential assassination, except that Washington D.C.’s hosting of Lincoln’s death probably has greater claim for biggest impact in general American culture.

Texas is big on barbecue, and they offer their own preferred cut of beef: brisket.  And brisket definitely is… okay.  I mean, it’s good.  It’s beef.  You can certainly get a lot out of one slice of the cow, but ironically, the best brisket I had the whole time I was there was from a man who’d lived most of his life in Utah.  He spent four days preparing that meat before it ever hit the fire, and nobody ever managed to do it better.

And even then, I have to say that while brisket is good, tri-tip is better.  Go California.

Was there nothing Texas could do the biggest and baddest?  Yes, it could.  It is the home of BlueBell Ice Cream.  Now, I have to admit, as much as I love ice cream, I’ve never been able to do what others do and set one brand of ice cream above another.  To me, the practice has been considerably silly.  Vanilla tastes like vanilla no matter where you’re at, and the experimentation of various flavors is fine, but can be quickly overdone by too much chocolate, nuts, birthday cake, and Charlie Brown’s rock that he passed out last Halloween.

And I did not believe in BlueBell, until I tried its limited special, Southern Blackberry Cobbler.  Blackberries are among my favorite fruit, and there pieces of pie crust sprinkled all over.  Because I am in the habit of mushing my ice cream into a milkshake, eating this flavor was like drinking pie, and that was delicious.

I was ready to rest my case.  Texas had the best ice cream in the world.  Until I went home for the summer the past couple weeks, and was enlightened.  I mentioned before that my family gets fresh milk straight from the cow’s udder.  Well, they also use the copious amounts of cream that come with it, and that cream has been used to make butter and their own ice cream.  And I found that there is something better over the rainbow.  Nothing compares with homemade ice cream, and I mean nothing, even when it’s not liquid pie.

I’d despaired of giving credit to Texas for anything this post.  No matter what, it could never quite make Number 1 at anything, until I realized that it was Number 1 at being Number 2.  And no one can take that from them.

My Sister's Movie Education

Last week, my sister decided that I was woefully uneducated in quality films.  She dropped by my parents place to hand me three films that she adored and wanted to see what I thought.  Always a dangerous question.

They all ended up being chick flicks, which I’m honestly okay with.  Unless the movie is Gone in 60 Seconds, I would rather watch a drama than a special effects carnival anyway.  But that Gone in 60 Seconds, well… that movie I never get tired of.

But to her picks, the first film I ended up watching with her was Juno.  To be honest, I’d been wanting to see Juno.  I avoided it for a while because the promos were hideous.  My impression was that I’d be sitting through a couple hours of teenage pregnancy being played for laughs.  Not interested.  By the time it came out on DVD, though, I’d been hearing a completely different story about it.  Still, I never quite made time for it until now.

My first surprise when I started watching it was the cast.  Michael Cera and Jason Bateman from Arrested Development, Jennifer Garner from Alias and 13 Going on 30, J.K. Simmons from the Spiderman movies, and I even recognized Ellen Page from X-Men: The Last Stand.  Heck, they even had Rainn Wilson from The Office step in for the first two minutes of the film.  These are some pretty big names going into this film.  My expectations for this movie went up.

And they met them.  Juno, high school moron, finds out she’s pregnant and tries to handle everything herself.  She first decides to abort and gets cold feet, and then prepares to put the kid up for adoption before she tells her parents anything.  And even after admitting to her parents, she continues to act more mature than she actually is.  Getting pregnant, oddly, was not enough to wake her up.  It takes her a while to actually hit rock bottom, but when she does, it is a spectacular splash.

In a weird way, Juno is the nearly opposite of a coming of age story.  Instead of learning to take on everything herself, Juno has to learn to stay out of the grown up world and be a kid a while longer.  And in its own way, this movie has a lot of important things to say about parenthood and the value children place on marriages working out, not just in their own families but in society as a whole.

There are a lot of jokes about the pregnancy, especially at the start, and while they were funny, none of them were there just for a laugh.  Each character’s wisecrack was a way of easing the tension they all felt, especially Juno, who is a sarcastic butt to begin with.  For all the edgy humor, I felt the writers were very sensitive and honest about a really delicate and painful period of this girl’s life.  By the end of the movie, I decided my sister to be a great judge of movies.

Then I saw Easy A and she lost a lot of credibility in the first 15 minutes.  It’s easily the trashiest movie I’ve seen in years.  It’s not often I learn new swear words but Easy A filled that gap in knowledge in a hurry.

The premise isn’t bad: Emma Stone’s character, Olive, tells one lie about how she went on a date over the weekend, and in no time at all, the school’s rumor mill has her pegged as the local teen harlot.  In a fit of pique, she decides to embrace the rumors and uses her new reputation to get things and accomplish stuff she couldn’t do before until, inevitably, the lies bite her in the butt.

A story like this should have been great.  There’s a core of honesty about the rumor mill that I haven’t seen in many other movies.  I had a friend a few years back who made a few indiscretions as a teenager; they were stupid but nothing that was truly damaging.  However, one misunderstanding a parent in town made caused nearly everybody in his church to believe that he was an alcoholic and drug pusher.  He was ostracized for nearly two years and he had no idea what was going on.  It wasn’t until his family moved away that he finally figured out what had happened; by then, it was too late to change anything.  The rumor mill had destroyed his reputation.

Easy A could have been a great commentary on this social aberration.  The writing was certainly clever and the actors had a lot of charm, even in the bit roles.

Instead, I got annoyed with everybody in the film, and the more charming they were, the worse it was.  Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci were brilliant as Olive’s mom and dad; they were likeable and funny… and the worst parents ever.  Instead of actively trying to figure out what was going on in her life, they were deliberately oblivious to what was going on, and instead of being a support, became clueless commentators on her behavior.

And, really, nobody seemed to have actual parents as the story progresses, or if they do, they have incredibly weak spines.  And these brats that are supposed to be in high school never feel like they’re teenagers, but adults with 10 IQ points taken off.

Did I mention it was trashy?

My sister had one chance left to make me think of her as a decent movie critic.  Pitch Perfect was her offering.  It’s pretty recent; it came out last year.  It’s a college story, and it feels more like college than Easy A’s high school felt like high school.  Beca is a new kid on campus, interested in pursuing a DJ career but gets her arm twisted into joining the Barden Bellas, one of the school’s several a capella groups.

The story is not ground breaking.  It’s a classic underdog tale where the Barden Bellas have tough competition, don’t get along with each other, but at the end come together and wow everyone.  I called everything from the get-go, but that’s okay, because all the actresses were fun, quirky, and sexy, and the actors all hit the right tone.

I did have a pleasant surprise as well.  The leader of the Barden Bellas, Aubrey, who comes off as an overbearing and judgmental witch, is actually my favorite character.  If anything, she comes off as the most well-rounded character in the story.  After humiliating herself so bad at that start of the film that all her actions are not mean-spirited; she’s just trying to recover her lost dignity and is going about it the wrong way.  I ended up rooting for her more than anyone else.

For all that, though, this is a musical.  Story is important, but in musicals, it doesn’t matter how good your story is: if the music sucks, nobody’s going to sit through it.  It’s my pleasure to say that the music did not suck, but was better than par.  At times, it was downright brilliant.

There aren’t any original songs in the film.  Everything is a cover performance, so in that regard, this is not a normal musical.  But I enjoy reinterpretation of familiar songs and I’m especially a fan of a capella.  The movie delivers.  The women do some amazing things with their voices, but if I’m going to be honest, the movie makes a point of putting the women as the underdogs, so for the bulk of the movie and for the sake of story, they’re deliberately singing below their talent level.  The men in the rival group do not have these story restrictions, so every song they sing is brilliant and I would not mind owning the soundtrack just to hear their performances again and again.

And the somewhat cheesy “riff-off” might be the best part of the whole film.

My sister redeemed herself.

And then she disparaged all the good John Hughes movies and thus everything she says is rendered suspect.

12 Step Addiction Recovery

During the last summer of my mission, my companion and I were riding with Bro. B— who had been kind enough to go teaching with us.  Our appointment fell through (not surprising; 80% of our appointments with anybody tended to go in that direction) and on our way back, Bro. B— asked if we would like to visit his AA building for a few minutes.  We had plenty of time and I was excited.  I’d been wondering for some time what Alcoholics Anonymous was like and this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

We didn’t get to see an actual meeting.  I was under the impression that those are for alcoholics only and besides, missionaries have other obligations during the day than to crash one of those meetings.  The building was locked but Bro. B— had been in AA so long that he had some leadership position and thus, keys to the building.  We got to visit the place an hour before their next meeting of the day, and I’ll admit, it was not anything near what I expected.

The AA building was in sort of a strip mall towards the back, brick building with lots of different colored plastic chairs and tables outside, set up for the smokers who needed to take a cigarette break.  Inside, my impressions was that it was mix between a chapel and an elementary school classroom.

The classroom portion came from the walls.  There were posters everywhere, each with the 12 Steps written on them or with inspirational quotations, pictures of famous people or otherwise encouraging portraits.  The walls had activities and shelves of books, including different published editions of The Book.

But the whole center of the room was designed like a chapel.  There weren’t pews or a rostrum or anything like that.  There were cushioned chairs and couches, and they were generally worn out pieces of furniture.  There was a pulpit off to the side and at the very front was a table, and the most significant thing on the table were sets of different colored poker chips.  Each had measurements of time: 1 Day, 1 Week, 1 Month, 3 Months, 1 Year, 2 Years, 5 Years, 10 Years, 25 Years, and various times in between.  All of these signified how long a person had been sober.

Bro. B— told us how meetings would often go.  There was somebody, often a leader I guess, who would speak some minutes to the group, and then they would have an open discussion with each other.  The conversations were confidential; what happens in AA stays in AA.  He let us know that the people were often pretty rough.  There was lots of swearing and sharing of horrible tragedies that had taken place in their lives.

In my two years in Texas, with the exception of a couple temple trips and one night in my apartment, I never felt the Spirit stronger than I did in that building at that time.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that experience, trying to understand why, of all the places I visited, this building would leave such an impression on me, and the only answer I can come up with was that this was a genuine house of repentance.

Since 1935, this program and the Twelve Steps they follow has been the pattern for millions to overcome their addiction to alcohol and to stay sober for years afterwards.  It is a wonderful model of how to repent, from recognizing their weakness to supplicating for a higher power to save and aid them, to taking specific actions for making restitution, and finally living their lives in such a way that they continually guard themselves from falling back and carrying the message to others who suffer from the same addiction.  I’ve found it to be a beautiful and inspired model to get away from the pain and shame alcoholism caused them and return to a more fulfilling and healthy lifestyle.

Well, my church seems to have felt the same way I did when I toured the building.  I discovered shortly afterwards that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has formed its own Twelve Step Program for Addiction Recovery.  The Church’s 12 Step Program is modeled off of Alcoholics Anonymous’ Twelve Steps, although with some subtle changes to be more compatible with the gospel.

The biggest change I am aware of is in Step 2:  AA’s second step is to believe in a power greater than themselves to restore them.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be God that they choose to believe in (although it can be.)  But they are required to find and recognize a higher power to help them through their journey to sobriety.  The Church, on the other hand, specifically teaches with its second step to believe in Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ and to trust them to help and save you from your addiction that afflicts you.

The focus is different but the gears are the same.  And I’ve gotten to see this firsthand these past two weeks.  My mom was recently called to be the coordinator for her stake’s 12 Step Program (for those unaware, a stake in our church is a geographical boundary consisting of several church congregations that meet in different buildings on Sunday.)

The addiction isn’t limited to alcoholism.  It can be an addiction to anything:  drugs, pornography, gambling, eating disorders, and any other what-have-you.  The past couple of weeks, my mom invited me to attend their meetings.  It’s a pretty new calling for her and she essentially has launched the program in her stake, so naturally, I came to support her.

And I came away impressed with their meetings.  Because of the confidentiality of this program, I can’t get too specific about the people who attended or what they shared, but what I loved was the sheer honesty of these people and the general goodwill all around.

The trouble with sin is that the sinner wants to hide what they’ve done and who they are from others.  Addiction especially makes the addict feel that they don’t belong and end up feeling like they are alone in their battle to get better.  The beauty of the 12 Step Program is that it tears away that wall of solitude and fear.  Being able to see that there are others, many others, who are either struggling now or are recovering brings a support and reassuring influence that may not have ever been there before.

This program is not just for members of my church (although they’re probably the ones who’ll here the most about them) but they are open for any and all people struggling with addiction and need help to overcome.  If anybody is interested or knows anybody with addiction and could use this type of resource, check out addictionrecovery.lds.org.  There’s further information about the program as well as meeting times and places for wherever you happen to live.

I truly believe that this has the ability to bless many lives and help them change into the best people that they can be.

#54--A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I’ve been pretty vocal that I haven’t been a huge fan of James Joyce.  A few years back, I started to read Ulysses, a beast of a book that is supposedly a retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey, but I found it to be an incredibly dense and boring tale of two shmucks spending their day navel gazing.  I put up a good fight; I was 400 pages in before I finally quit, but quit I had to if I wanted my sanity intact for the next month.

When I saw a small collection of Joyce’s books on the Must Read List, I’d intended to put them off as long as I could.  However, my library has a few shelves of “honor” books; you can just take them and return them whenever you want.  This is important, especially when I’m unsure how high a priority it is to me to finish a certain book.  I saw A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the first thing I noticed was that it was short.  Less than 200 pages short.  I decided I liked this book already just based on size.  It looked like something by James Joyce that I could finish.

What was more surprising was how much I liked the book.  It has five chapters and each chapter focuses on a different time in Stephen Dedalus’s life.  Chapter 1 starts off irritating. The first few pages are a bunch of unconnected incidents and thoughts, and the narrative jumps around with little to no transition in between.  I got over that, though, once I saw that this was being told from a Stephen’s point-of-view as a young child until he’s sent off to live at a Catholic school.

Chapter 2 is surrounded by the time when Stephen’s family endures financial hardships.  In Chapter 3, Stephen is 16 and very concerned about his immortal soul.  He’s been fornicating and living a duplicitous life still attending his old school.  He finally confesses and feels free.  Chapter 4, he has an opportunity to join the clergy and instead, he gives up religion entirely.  Chapter 5, he’s at a university and in one day, has many conversations with various college mates and decides that the best thing to do is leave the country and pursue his art.

In summary, this is the story of a young man who decides that the best way to live is to be free of attachments to any religious or national organization, because any relationship with them betrays his true self and mars his sense of beauty.

I disagree with this philosophy entirely, and I find it damaging not only to society but I’ve yet to see it benefit the individual as well.  Stephen, by the end, in his mind has lofty ideas and seems inspired by truth, but in practice, he is little more than a lazy, lecherous, selfish blowhard who is unapologetically shirking his responsibilities.  I hate being around people like this.  How did I enjoy this book?

It was Chapter 1 that cinched the deal.  Yes, it had a frustrating start, but by the end, I came to love this little boy.  Joyce created some very moving scenes that captured the helplessness children have among the adults.  He has to endure a horrible Christmas dinner because the grownups don’t have the decency to be civil one day out of the year.  And then there’s the punishment sequence; his glasses break and he orders home for a new one so he is excused from his schoolwork.  But when a prefect hears that he’s not doing schoolwork, the prefect will hear no excuses but instead hits Stephen in front of the whole class for being lazy.

These scenes were so moving and brought so much depth to a character who would otherwise have seemed pathetic to me.  The events of childhood have a great determining factor in how we act and behave in adulthood, and while I may not approve of his actions later in the story, I found them to be very understandable.

There is a fair bit of navel gazing, especially towards the end of the book.  It might be my age now as opposed to when I read Ulysses, or perhaps Portrait is simply a clearer tale, but I was able to handle the navel gazing.  I even enjoyed some of the conversations and thoughts that Stephen has over the course of the tale.

I am going to recommend this book, but with a severe caution: it is not easy reading.  Joyce is loquacious and fairly didactic as well.  The man was educated and it’s clear that he liked to show off.  This comes through in the narrative so if you go into it, be prepared.

Blackberries and The Moon

In the back of my parents’ home is a creek where I used to play with my brother and friends.  It was never deep enough to swim, but we’d often go wading, build forts around there, sneak across to the other neighbor’s back property and goof around there.  When I went to check it out the other day, I was a little discouraged.  It’s become so overgrown that I couldn’t even see the water for all the lilies and blackberry bushes.

The lilies were a surprise, but the blackberries certainly were not.  These perennial brambles are the weed that can conquer the earth more effectively than any army I can imagine.  They start off small; a vine here, a root there, and next year half of your fence and its surrounding area has been swallowed by this thorny monster.

Exterminating the blackberry bushes is an exercise in determination and patience.  I have gone through more pairs of gloves pruning, uprooting and pulling these vines away from where they’re not wanted.  One year, in a fit of irritation, we decided to light the bushes on fire and save ourselves a lot of grief.  The flames rose 10 feet, the smoke rose to unprecedented heights, the heat was incredible, and about 30 feet worth of the fence was cleared.  That was a good day.

For a time after I moved out, my parents let a friend keep his goats out back, and apparently those goats ate those suckers to the ground.  Those animals would have been the best deterrent they ever had if they weren’t constantly escaping into other neighbors’ yards.  Well, go figure.

Considering how much time and effort my family has put in trying to make sure that the vines don’t cover our house the way the brambles did Sleeping Beauty’s palace, I tend to forget just how wonderful those berries taste.  If you can handle getting your hands cut up a bit (and this is inevitable; those thorns are many more than those on roses and can be meaner, too) picking blackberries is one of the most enjoyable activities in the world.  They taste wonderful off the vine; they explode with flavor and each berry seems to have its own personality.  One is sweet, another tart, and none of them lasting long enough.  My hands turn red from picking so many to fit in my mouth and I’m sure that my teeth wished that I’d brushed them sooner than I did that night.

They also make the best jams and pies.  In my frustration with keeping them down, I’d forgotten that blackberry pie just might be my favorite pie in the world.  If there was only a way to cultivate them without the constant need of shears.

Oh, well.  I assuage my irritation by remembering that I no longer have to worry about anymore.  <knocks on wood>

                        ***

A few unexpected things happened over my vacation.  A few of them came from my sisters and their friends.  Just recently, one of them had the bright idea to write all over their thighs with nail polish.  That took until the next day to come off, with some serious pain on their side and a horrible stink in the room for the rest of us to endure.

I haven’t really had a quiet moment since arriving.  I exact my revenge by making fun of them on this blog.

Unfortunately, not all of the surprises have been so ephemeral.  On first arriving home, I learned that a girl I knew had committed suicide not too long before.  Then, last week, another woman that my family was friends with passed away because of old age.  These deaths being so close together, it’s given me a lot to think on.

I really didn’t know either woman very well.  If I spoke to them for more than five minutes at a time, I can’t recall the circumstance.  Yet, it has crossed my mind several times after hearing both women’s stories, that no matter whether the death was long or slow coming, whether it was expected by their families or not, departing this world is never easy and often painful.  If we could choose how mortality works, I’m sure everybody would make some serious changes.

It reminded me of a poem I started a couple weeks before.  It’s quite obvious at the time I began that I was thinking about unfulfilled love, but as I considered more, I realized that this is also about everything we wish we could change but are powerless to do, because in reality, it is impossible.  I don’t know that this would ever provide comfort, but in some small way, I hope it can show some understanding.

                        ***

The evening now draws ever near
And as I looked at the sky so clear,
I asked the heavens for one small boon:
I begged them to let me kiss the moon.

The moon is truly a maiden fair.
I see her face and can only stare
At the beauty in which she is dressed;
Of all the ladies I’ve met, she is best.

I think of her as I go to bed,
Thinking of things I ought to have said.
I would ask her if to me she’d wed,
But I know that not for me is her light shed.

I’ve often thought if I could kiss the moon
That it would be just a simple boon,
A favor from one I hold so dear,
Yet she’d rather be up there and not here,

No, not here with me on lowly earth,
This place of sorrow, ne’er of mirth.
My lady instead will dance, and dance alone
Around the world, dance over our bones.

Tonight, I go out and cannot see her face.
She’s hidden, ridden to her secret place,
A home for which there is no room
For this shamed and hopeless groom.

Now I see from this dream I must veer
For the woman has made it, oh, so clear
That I will ne’er be granted this boon:
That I should kiss my love, the moon.

Burn Notice, Popular Belief, Sedaris, and More Comics

Lately, the movies and shows I watch come straight from Netflix.  For $8 a month, I get to watch shows that would normally cost me $30 per season… that’s not even a competition.  The real trouble is finding time to watch all the programs I want, and the truth is, there isn’t enough time in the world.

I thought I could make a dent in some of my shows with this vacation, but the internet connection is not the greatest.  But just because I can’t take full advantage of Netflix right now is no reason to despair of my TV habit.  After a couple years of hearing my mom rave about it, I finally got to watch our family friend’s DVD collection of Burn Notice.

The spy story is a close cousin to the heist story, and I love a good heist.  I love watching a team of colorful characters who normally would have nothing to do with each other, force themselves to cooperate long enough to get a job done.  I love the planning, I love watching the execution, seeing how they have to improvise, and the little victory dance they do at the end (I’ve never seen anybody do a dance, but that would be a nice touch.)

Michael Westen is a burned CIA spy, meaning that he’s been kicked out, had all his bank accounts and assets frozen, dumped in Miami, and been left to fend for himself.  To make his way, he takes on clients (generally regular folks) who are in way over their heads and need his particular expertise to get out of their situations.  He’s got his ex-girlfriend (and her amazing arsenal of guns and explosives), a friend who used to inform on him, and his mom (not trained in any spy capacity at all, but she’s more capable than even she lets on.)

Each episode is very self-contained.  They get the job and you get to watch the job get completed, and always with Michael’s amusing asides, little narrations explaining why spies do the things they do and how to complete them.  You can start anywhere in the series and get a satisfying story on completing for the client.  But you also get to see the larger story unfold, as Michael slowly solves the mystery of why he got burned and his entanglements with the conspiracy that’s continually ruining his life.

It’s a lot of fun and is ruining my life by being so hard to walk away from.

                        ***

I haven’t wasted my entire vacation watching TV.  I’ve spent the rest of the time finishing four books.  Four books in one week!  It’s been a long while since I made time for that.

A few of them are on the Must Reads list, and I’ve been happy to knock those out.  One was a sheer impulse read.  I found Contrary to Popular Belief by Joey Green.  It purports to expose more than 250 beliefs society holds that are flat out wrong, and they’re pretty interesting… for the most part.

For example, George Washington is technically the ninth president of the United States.  However, nobody remembers the first eight because they were presidents under the Articles of Confederation while Washington was the first president under the Constitution.

A lot of these would be known if people would just look them up at the source.  Like Noah and the ark, it wasn’t two beasts of every kind; it was seven pairs of clean beasts (for sacrifice) two of unclean, and seven pairs of fowl.  Put together like that, the ark feels more crowded than before.

Others are just fun.  Cooties are actually real.  They’re body lice that spread typhus.  I had no idea.  I just thought it was an easy way to keep elementary boys and girls from touching each other.

And then there were some that made me smack my head and think, I should have known better.  I had a post a few months back on a cute children’s book I found, How They Croaked.  The book said and I passed along that caesarean sections were named after Julius Caesar, because that’s how he came into the world.  Not true.  He was not a C-section baby, and the term lex caesarea (law of incision) pre-dates from as early as the 7^th century BCE.  It’s something I should have been more skeptical about, and I’m glad Joey Green set me straight.

But I don’t feel completely terrible, because I can fact check him on one page.  He said that in the novel Frankenstein, Frankenstein names the monster Adam whereas he never names the monster in the film.  Not true.  Frankenstein never names the monster at all.  The monster calls himself “the Adam of your labors” and makes another symbolic reference to his creation as the Adam of Frankenstein later, but that’s never actually his name.

Okay, so that was just a quibble.  It’s still a great little book.  I haven’t had as much fun reading a fact book since Panati’s Extraordinary Origins of Ordinary Things by Charles Panati—which is still one of the best books I’ve ever read.  That goes in my personal list of books everybody should read before they die.

                        ***

I’m very fussy about my entertainment and comedy more than most.  There are few things more unpleasant than sitting through a series of jokes that are supposed to be funny but are instead lame.  And this more true in writing than anything else.

Terry Pratchett has been the king of satire for years.  I seriously believe to be the funniest author living still.

I used to have Dave Barry to look forward to.  He was half the reason that I still read the newspaper until he decided to move on and leave the paper soulless.  Fortunately, he’s had plenty of books out.

And, of course, there’s Douglas Adams, although his stories got more disappointing the longer that time went on.

Still, out of everything I read, you’d think I’d have a bigger pool of humorists to recommend.  That just hasn’t been the case.

Until I found David Sedaris.  I’ve been familiar with the name for over a year.  His books took up over a shelf on the Essay bay in Barnes & Noble and there were constant customers buying his book.  Over my break, I decided to give Me Talk Pretty One Day a shot… and I laughed till I cried.

Not all of his essays are created equally, but his writing is so crisp and clear that you move through it fast.  The first half of the essays are about his family life and education, from dealing with a speech therapist in elementary school, to growing up with his dad’s obliviousness, to the problems with drugs in art school.  The second half is what life was like moving to France and the woes of learning the language.  I’m surprised he never killed his French teacher.

I’ll be keeping an eye on the rest of his bibliography.

                        ***

Because I don’t read enough, I’m always on the lookout for more and webcomics fills a daily need.  My latest three discoveries are:

Sandra and Woo by Powree and Oliver Knörzer.  Sandra is 8-10 (I’m guessing) girl who lives with her widower father, and Woo is her pet talking raccoon.  Naturally, she’s the only one he’ll speak to.  I would have loved to see this comic in the newspapers when I was a kid.  I would have been as attached to these characters as I ever was to Calvin, Hobbes, Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and everybody in the Garfield gang.  It is delightful.

Star Power by Michael Terracciono and Garth Graham.  I put off reading this one, because Terracciono’s Dominic Deegan became so disappointing halfway through its run.  Star Power, though, has such an intriguing premise: a superheroine in space, and this time, it’s Graham doing the artwork.

Run Freak Run by Silver Saaremael and Kaija Rudkiewicz.  It’s a medieval graphic novel set in Spain.  I’m tempted to label this one a horror, where the main character is an Inquisitor who has a creepier background than she at first appears.