hello blogland

I would first like to thank Chris for letting me join the blog. I just recently found out what a blog is and am glad to be a part of the in-crowd. So I just heard from my little brother that he is the stage manager for tonight's Quiet Riot and Skid Row concert at the University of Utah. Sweet. It reminded me how much I hate Smithstix/ticketmaster. Aside from the obviously vexatious "Service fee" that they charge for everything they sell, which is crap, I have a personal experience that furthers my hatred. In the summer of 2002 I bought tickets to see Skid Row, Tesla, and Vince Neal. I was mostly looking forward to seeing Skid Row because i have seen Vince and the Crue various times and wasn't that in to Tesla at the time (which since has changed). The ticket clearly said 7:00 pm was when the show started, so we got there at 6:30 just to make sure. We entered the David O McKay center (yes, Skid Row played a place named after a prophet) to hear the lines "WE ARE THE YOUTH GONE WILD. thank you, we will be at the merch booth to sing autographs in twenty minutes." It's true, I missed Skid Row because of Smithstix's incompetence and I will never forgive them.
Moral of the story, buy from the box office and put the middle man out of business. I will try to think of some better material to write on, I was just really excited to post something and now I have, so I can put a little more thought into future posts.
"Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediatley, no matter what the charmer had in mind." -Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

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Complications

I have a mantra I repeat to myself every so often that looks and sounds like this: "Things are always more complicated than they seem." Deceptively simple, huh? I like it because it never lets me down. If something doesn't go the way I want or if something or someone surprises me, that's ok, it was inevitable--because whatever the situation was or was not, it certainly was more complicated than it appeared.

Recently, however, I've realized that my mantra played a sneaky meta-trick on me and has itself become more complicated than it seems. To avoid the risk of diving too deep into specifics (and amusing all of you with the ridiculousness of my life), let's just agree that my little saying has led me to over-complicate things one too many times in recent days. I've decided that me and my quote are going to part ways for a while so we can see other people and experience newer, less-complicated, tidbits of folk-wisdom.

This week I think I'll flirt a bit with an Einstein quotation: "Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler."

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Politics and the Church

Two recent events have caught my attention. While each of them deserves to be fully explored in separate posts, I am combining them to ask a bigger question about the Church’s involvement in shaping public policy.

This past year Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, Jr. has been pushing a tax reform package through the Utah State Legislature. One of the hotly contested measures was eliminating deductions for charitable giving. Lawmakers debated the provision for over five months without reaching a consensus. Then one day last September the LDS Church sent a representative to Utah’s Capitol Hill to read a statement before the committee working on this reform. The statement urged lawmakers to preserve the tax deductions for charitable donations. The result? Governor Huntsman immediately reigned in his expert witnesses, and lawmakers scrambled to clarify the meaning of the church statement. Weeks later, new reforms were proposed that preserved these deductions. In all fairness, many charitable organizations opposed this measure, not just the Church (including the Utah Homeowner’s Association, AARP, Utah Issues, the United Way, the Utah Symphony, the Utah Education Savings Plan, and others). However, only the Church’s opposition to this idea stopped it dead in its tracks. Over 80% of Utah’s lawmakers are LDS and many admitted that the Church’s statement put them in a difficult situation. (To read more about this, click here and here).

More recently (last week), Senator Bennett inserted a provision into the Department of Agriculture’s appropriation bill that “shields religious groups from a federal law against knowingly transporting, concealing, harboring or shielding an illegal immigrant.” Bennett’s motivation? Prodding by LDS Church officials to allow illegal immigrants to serve as missionaries. Rep. Tom Tancredo attacked this policy today as a loophole that allows religious groups to abet terrorists through “church activities.” (See this article.)

Now, I am less concerned with the substance of these policies. I am sure there are good reasons to support or oppose them. What is interesting to me is how the Church has become more assertive in politics and seems to be straying from their policy of at least appearing neutral. The Church must obviously walk a fine line between advocacy for protective policies and putting LDS lawmakers in an awkward, if not untenable situation. Add to this confusion the following quote from this speech by Elder Russell Nelson at a conference in Kiev, Ukraine:

Therefore, care must be exercised to assure that government remains truly neutral in matters of religion, not only in lip service and constitutional guarantees, but also in impartial application of the law. Individuals and institutions are naturally inclined to seek preference over others, but the state must not yield to those inclinations. To discriminate in favor of one religion, using nonreligious labels such as "culture" or "history," is to discriminate against others.

What are your thoughts on the matter?

Finish reading post.

Missing Identity

For the most part I have considered myself to be fairly self-confident. Granted, everyone has their moments in adolescence when they wonder who they are and what their purpose is, and I am no different. However, I always had something to set myself apart from others.

I loved the scriptures as a teenager ( strange, I know) but I loved the stories and the teachings and in Sunday school, I knew all the answers and the stories. I felt special because I knew those things, and I loved surprising the teachers with how much I knew. ( Now I realize how LITTLE I actually knew but hindsight is always 20/20).

Maybe that was because during those years I was in podunk Idaho, but even in the huge cities in Japan, I felt confident. Maybe that was because I was a missionary and I knew I had a special purpose and I knew that the Spirit would guide us and Heavenly Father would protect us, no questions aksed.

But for some reason, in coming to Washington DC, I feel like I am experiencing an identity crisis.
I am just one of how many hundreds of thousands of people here? I am a mere peon in an office run by the Japanese government (though they won't admit it). People identify themselves differently here. " I'm Republican", "I'm a Democrat", " I have a Ph.D", "I'm going to law school" etc...

On top of all this, I have to figure out who I should be as a woman within the church. Part of me would really like to go back to school ( admid horrible fears that I will fail miserably) and while trying not to have heart attack at the thought of how much our combined student debt would be....

On the other hand, I also feel a strong push ( especially from Sheldon's mom- thanks) that we need to have children. I am actually excited at the thought of someday having children, but the time just doesn't seem right. And in this regard, I have found something interesting here.There have been some instances where I feel like I have been discriminated against because I AM NOT A MOTHER, yet. There is a certain mother, who, while friendly enough, seems to put a wall around her everytime I try to befriend her. She talks freely and spends lots of time with other "MOM"s, but because I don't have children, I feel like she is purposefully pushing me away.

In a sense I can see why over-identifying with one aspect of ourselves can be dangerous, as in Mom above, but what if you don't feel like you have a label that you can attach to yourself? I suppose that's not necessarily a bad thing. Knowing that we are children of our Heavenly Father and that He loves us should be enough of an identity, shouldn't it?

Anyway, I'm not quite sure what I wanted to say, but if anyone has any thoughts on any of the subjects on which i rambled, I would love to read them.

Finish reading post.

Chloroform in Print

Everyone knows the famous Mark Twain quotation about the Book of Mormon being "chloroform in print." For the most part I think he's right; its prose is less than user-friendly and its plot is fairly complicated. But I wonder if it's literary construction is that way for a reason. Isaiah, prophecying of Jesus' incarnation, writes that he "hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him there is no beauty that we should desire him." You could say the same thing about the Book of Mormon.

Maybe this all goes back to Kierkegaards thoughts on aurthority and aesthetics. We don't want to mistake the beautiful for the authoritative, and one way to keep things clear is to make sure the authoritative isn't very beautiful. (I don't say that's the only reason for the Book of Mormon's clunky prose, just one possibility)

Finish reading post.