Divergent diverges not very far at all...

Guys, how long has it been since I wrote a movie review?  Since The Great Gatsby I think. Wow, that's a long time.  Probably because I hardly ever see movies in the theatre anymore.  But I did last night.  Saw Divergent with my good friend Mike.  We were both inspired to see the film after we read this article about the "rape scene" in the film (in the interest of accuracy, it's not exactly a rape scene).  Aside from that article and one other, I literally knew nothing about either the books or the movie--nothing about the plot or the themes or the characters.

So I came to the movie as an almost entirely clean slate.  And the overall reaction?  It was pretty good.  But it had a lot more potential than it actually fulfilled.

Quick summary (there be spoilers ahead), for those who want it:  Post the traditional "devastating war" society has once again withdrawn behind a great big wall that shields them from the mysterious "other side."  To maintain peace after said war society was divided into five "factions" which each are built around a specific characteristic: Amity (they're nice), Abnegation (they're selfless), Erudite (the smarties), Candor (totes honest), and Dauntless (brave).  Each faction is in charge of certain aspects of life that suits their strengths.  At 16, after taking a test which supposedly tells you in which faction you belong, you then get to decide which you will belong to for the rest of your life notakebacksforever.  Enter Beatrice "Triss" Prior, born Abnegation, but super conflicted cause she just doesn't naturally let people take advantage of her.  This is reinforced when she takes the test and, instead of neatly fitting into one faction or another, qualifies for three: abnegation, erudite, and dauntless.  This is known as being "divergent" and is apparently real bad.  At the ceremony she makes the difficult decision to abandon her family and join Dauntless (faction over blood so she's basically leaving them behind forever).  Having joined Dauntless she enters into a rigorous training program because the Dauntless are the police force.  Smaller and weaker than nearly everyone else, she struggles to keep up during the first, physical phase of testing.  But in phase two, focusing on mental training, she suddenly shoots ahead of everyone.  It is here her "divergent" qualities emerge as she is able to deal with the mental testing far too easily.  But this is also dangerous, because the better she does in the tests the more evident it becomes that she is divergent....and oh my gosh, the bad guys (Erudites...because everyone knows that heroes are strong and villains are smart) are hunting down divergents cause they're dangerous...because reasons.  Obligatory Love Interest (hereafter known as Eyebrows and Lips because his real name is equally stupid) teaches her how to beat the tests like a true dauntless, however, and she manages to pass her final test undetected and graduate from initiate to official Dauntless.  Just in time for the climactic fulfillment of the evil Erudite plan...which is to drug all the Dauntless into mindless drones who will obey the Erudite's orders to go massacre the Abnegations...because no one can stand those selfless bastards anyway.  But handy!  When you're divergent you're also magically immune to the drone drug!  So Triss and Eyebrows and Lips (who is a sort of...intentionally cultivated divergent?  it's not clear) break away, shoot some people, get captured, Eyebrows and Lips is taken away by Darkest Timeline Kate (Winslet), but Triss is saved by Action Hero Ashley (Judd), also known as her mother who turns out was born a dauntless.  There's fighting and Triss rescues Eyebrows and Lips and together they save the day and then run away with a few friends outside the wall into exile to await the sequel where they'll, no doubt, lead a rebellion/revolution. (end of spoilers)

Shailene Woodley plays the main character, Beatrice (shortened to Triss early in the film).  Ms. Woodley also played Alex King in 2011's The Descendants, which you may know as a movie that I absolutely adore.  This was the only other thing I knew about the movie and I'll admit that it was a big draw.  She had done an incredibly good job as the struggling but ultimately good daughter in The Descendants and really impressed me.  And she did an equally good job in Divergent.  Triss could very easily be ruined in the translation to the big screen, becoming one dimensional and irritating--an especially alarming possibility since the entire basis for the character is that she specifically isn't one particular thing but many).  But Shailene really managed to create a complex character who is both brave AND self-sacrificing AND intelligent.  And even more impressively, she did so in a way that made her believable.  This was augmented by giving her believable physical abilities--namely, she, a tiny little girl who has never hit anyone in her life, is pretty consistently owned in every physical fight she gets into.  Let's all take a moment to celebrate the non-existence of any "waif-fu" in this movie.  By the end she does manage to hold her own for at least a few minutes before being laid waste but that feels more like a realistic development of her abilities due to hard work over time.

Shailene is supported by a nice cast of surrounding characters.  Eyebrows and Lips seems a little too beautiful (hence his name here) but puts in a pretty solid performance for a generic character.  But my favorites were Triss's friends.  They gave great performances and their relationships felt realistic and grounded.  I particularly liked Zoe Kravitz (yes, Lenny's daughter) who looks like a cross between her daddy and Kerry Washington.  She delivered her "candor" lines believably and she and Triss worked off each other nicely.

And as the original article I linked to discusses, the movie is definitely an impressive effort at bringing a real "strong female character" to the screen.  Triss's bodily autonomy is zealously defended.  She is independent and able to enforce her own decisions.  She manages to be a fighter without being completely cold and emotionless, which seems to be a very common trend in characterizing "strong" women.  And while she retains a great deal of selflessness, a solid argument can be made that it is the product of her upbringing rather than her gender.  Overall there are some really worthy ideas that they're tucking into the film.

But guys...there's some issues.  The premise itself seems pretty deeply flawed to me, and then the specific plot was kind of arbitrary.  Apparently the Abnegations run the government because they're selfless, but the Erudites want to seize control because...they want the power I assume?  But that's never stated, instead you have Darkest Timeline Kate, apparently the architect of this plan, asserting that she believes in her cause--indeed, she is willing to die for it.  But...what is her cause?  Because being willing to die for power doesn't quite make sense.  So what is she so passionate about?  I mean, she says several times that Abnegations are going to destroy the peace...but she never explains how.  There's just a whole bunch of sort of implied accusations and nothing concrete.  It was frustrating.

Additionally, it was painfully predictable.  I don't know how many times I leaned over to Mike and called exactly what was going to happen in the next moment.  I am, however, sort of lenient with predictability in films because the opposite problem--twists simply for the sake of twists--is infinitely more grating to me.

I did find the idea interesting.  Telling people what they are and then shutting them into societies built around that one trait so that they never try to develop any further aspects of themselves has some really interesting potential.  But I'm not sure that they followed through on the full possibilities of it.  They touched on it a bit with Eyebrows and Lips when he says that he wants to be more than just one thing.  But perhaps that further development will happen in the second story?

I think that in the end my biggest complaint is somewhat more meta than just this one film.  It is a complaint about the way YA books are adapted into movies, over and over again.  Let's look at some trailers.  First, here's the trailer for this movie:

How about The Hunger Games

The Host

Do you notice how all of these kind of feel the same?  Let's try one that's a little more fantasy

Those are all pretty recent, let's look at one that is sci fi and based on a pretty classic book

Huh...it somehow still looks...just the same.

Now lets look at a trailer that was just released for one of the greatest YA books ever written, The Giver

.....


....

....

wow.  Exactly the same.

Now, if any of you have read The Giver, and I sincerely hope you all have, you know that if ever there was a book that did not fit in the "heroic action adventure" category this is it.  The Giver is about reason and emotion and decision making and many fantastic things...but it is definitely not about action.  And if anyone had, for some reason, called me up and asked me if I had any ideas about how to make a movie of The Giver I could have given you plenty.  Creative and different ideas that would work with or maybe even enhance the natural strengths of the story.  I'm not being arrogant here, I'm pretty sure that any fan of the book could do the same if they tried for 10 seconds.  But what do we get here?  Perhaps the most egregious example of the same movie that they've now been making for years, with an almost insulting effort at ill-deserved legitimacy in the casting of some big names (but really Meryl...it actually hurts me that you're in this).  Say what you want about the source material being similar (I won't argue that there's a disturbing lack of innovative creativity in contemporary YA lit), if The Giver is being steamrolled flat into the same exact movie as the rest then it is clear that the source material has only the very most cosmetic influence on the actual move.  As my brother said "we based this movie on the title of a popular book."

And that was my biggest complain about Divergent.  Instead of trying to make a complex interesting movie that excels in different or unusual ways, they made the only kind of movie they think you can make--pretty people fighting in exciting action scenes.  And sure, the book may be a generic entry into the Hunger-Games-inspired dystopian YA genre (I'll let you know once I've finished reading it).  But the thing is, and this is the most frustrating part, you can still see the echoes of interesting and unique ideas; however they're like over cooked vegetables...recognizable as something that once had nutritional value, but now just a soggy mess.  

But as I said, that is more of a meta criticism leveled at Hollywood in general.  If I set aside that overarching annoyance I can say that I liked this movie more than I expected to.  I went in fully prepared to enjoy myself MST3K style, but ended up appreciating the movie for its merits rather than its mockable potential.  So maybe go see it...but I support you if you decide to wait for it to hit the dollar theatre.

Hal Steinbeigle

It was my dad's birthday last week.  I've been thinking about this post for a while now, but I think it was his birthday that finally prompted me to put everything into words.  I'm kind of nervous to share this because, while I meant it to be happy, and I feel like I said the good things I wanted to say, I am aware that there's a long of hard stuff here.  And I don't want to hurt my dad's feelings anymore than I already have in the past.  But I also really feel like I want to say all this aloud, so...dad, please take this as I meant it--and that is with the very best of intentions...

Several years ago I had a different blog on a different website.  There were only about three people who read that blog and to be honest, I thought of it more like an online journal that a couple of my friends happened to read than a public forum.  But apparently I had, at some point early in the blog's history, given the address to my dad and, unbeknownst to me, he was reading at least some of my posts there.  He read one, in particular, that I regret to this day.  I'm not really sure what it was about, but in it I talked about how sad I've always felt that I never got to have the doting father/daughter relationship I would see in movies or books.  I talked about it at some length because it honestly has been a sore point to me for most of my life.

Some time after that, during one of his weekly calls, my dad brought that blog post up.  He had read it and he was sad and I think a bit hurt by what I'd said.  Understandably so.  He told me that he'd always loved me and doted on me.  I don't remember exactly what I said to him but it was something along the lines of "it's ok dad, don't worry about it" and I left it at that.  I don't think I particularly believed him, but I didn't really think about it.

You see, I've long believed that, despite what they say about divorce--how it's so terrible and hard on the children and it inevitably leaves scars--my parents' divorce was the lone exception to that rule.  I didn't think  that I had any of that baggage that they say every kid picks up.  That might sound stupid, but that is legitimately what I thought for many many years.  But you're right.  It was stupid.

I say that with all due respect to my mother.  I know that she and my dad both did the very best they could to keep me and Dan out of the divorce.  But unfortunately, there's only so much you can do in a situation like that, and so some of my mom's feelings got passed along to me.  And I think I picked up a few on my own.

Because I had a hard time with my dad growing up.  Not a dramatic hard time.  We didn't get into screaming matches or have knock-down-drag-out fights.  But that may just be because that is neither my style nor my dad's.  Instead, I just didn't like him.  I went through a very distinct phase of disliking my dad at every age.  I remember explaining that, though I loved my dad--you have to love your dad--I didn't like him.  I hated it whenever anyone would tell me I was like him in anyway--that I looked like him or acted like him or thought like him.  I didn't want any part of him.

And I thought I didn't have any baggage from the divorce?

Once I hit college I thought I was over my childhood issues with my dad.  We talked fairly regularly and I didn't dislike him anymore.  I didn't really have any opinion about him at all.  He was just there.  I could honestly tell him not to worry about it when he called upset about a blog post where his daughter complained that she hadn't felt loved by her daddy...

I'm sad to say that it wasn't until these last few years that I've finally begun to really look at my relationship with my dad.  Rather, I've finally begun to really look at my dad himself.  Because I think that has been one of the biggest problems for me...

I haven't ever looked at my dad as an actual person.

Some several months ago I asked my dad for the first time ever why he went inactive after he and my mom got divorced.  I was surprised when he told me that it was because he felt ashamed and embarrassed...just like my mom had felt.

During a Thanksgiving visit (either last year's or the year before) dad and I were walking together, just the two of us.  I think I asked him about how my Uncle Phil and Aunt Vickie had started dating, but he ended up just telling me stories about all of them in college.  I had never heard any of them before.

And then there was the time maybe a year or two ago.  We were talking on the phone.  I have no idea how it came up, but dad told me about one of his favorite memories of me when I was a baby.  He said he loved to come home from work and put on music and sit with me on the floor and I would "dance" the way babies dance.

That conversation was the turning point for me.

I know it was probably just a bit of conversation for my dad, but the fact is...I cannot remember any sweet simple moments like that with my dad.  Beyond that, I can't remember him ever even telling me about any thing like that.  Until that conversation.  At that moment I realized that I didn't really know anything about my dad, either when I was a baby or at any other time in his life.

I had an epiphany about the divorce and my baggage, and it was that I had it.  I had picked up my mom's pain, and my own, and from a very young age my dad had ceased to be a person and had instead simply become a sort of blank figure that had failed to be around.  And for the first time I could see that and how it had warped my opinion of him from my earliest memories till that moment.  And I realized that I was not happy with that fact.

I can't really explain a process or describe an overt effort.  I don't even know if, should you ask my dad, he would be aware that anything about our relationship has changed in the last few years.  But I can tell you that it has.  Because I like my dad now.  And I love him--not just because everyone has to love their father.

I found some letters over Christmas that he and my mom had written to my Uncle Adam while he was on his mission.  I discovered that my dad's cursive handwriting (at least at that time) looked exactly like mine, and it made me happy.  Because I no longer hate the idea that any part of me comes from my dad.  I am sporadically and strangely left-handed, which I can only assume comes from him.  We both enjoy walking instead of driving.  We both like debating with people (some might call it arguing).  And we have a shared love of books and movies.  I know that my love of analyzing and evaluating stories comes from him; he is the best and only person I call to have those sorts of conversations.  After twentysome years of rejecting any similarities with my dad I am at last appreciating each and every one I can find.

I know this seems like more of a painful blog post than a happy one to dedicate to someone for their birthday.  Unfortunately, the past is the past and I cannot change what was.  But I wanted to make it clear exactly where I have come from so that it would be in context, with it's full significance, when I say that I love my dad and I am grateful to have him as my parent and friend.  I may not have known it growing up, but I know now that he loves me.  I am sorry for my behavior as a child, a teenager, and a young adult.  I'm sorry for my insensitivity and ignorance.  And I want to thank him for enduring all of it.  He has stuck with Daniel and I the best he could and I am lucky.  I admit, sometimes I'm a little bit jealous of my little brother Seth.  He's getting the childhood with my dad that I never got to have.

But the good news is that we get to have the rest of our lives to make up for that.

In Defense of Earnestness

How long has it been since I wrote a blog post likening dancing and life?  Too long, I think.  So I think I'll just fix that right now.

So I have this friend Spencer who is known throughout our local dance community for his rather...flamboyant dance style.  Words like "infamous" or "melodramatic" might be used to describe it.  And certainly Spencer's dancing does have more drama than anyone else in our scene--involving a lot more sweeping hands and passionate embraces than you'll see anywhere else.  And much as we love Spencer, I don't think that there is anyone that hasn't made at least one good-humored joke about, or attempted over-dramatic parody of, his style, myself included.

But say you're a person like me who gets the occasional song obsession.  You know, where you hear a song and it feels like it had to have been written specifically for you at just this moment in your life.  You listen to it over and over and when you even try to listen to something else it just feels wrong.  Well, maybe you don't know that feeling.  But it's a common enough experience in my life.  And I just happen to be in the midst of another iteration of it right now.  With this song:


In the midst of my obsession comes ULX, and I get to play my current favorite song during one of the dances.  Dancing a favorite song is serious business because you want someone who will do your song justice.  Who do I want to dance with?

The answer is Spencer.

Why would I want to dance with the drama queen of our scene?  Isn't he just going to turn my song into a big joke?

The thing about watching Spencer dance is that that is exactly what you're doing--you're watching him.  You're not dancing with him.  And from that outside perspective it is hard to take him seriously when every dance looks like the same.  There's the hands.......there's cheek to cheek connection......there's sharp turns......yep, it's all there...  It's one thing if you see someone who dances "normally" most of the time dancing like that.  Clearly they're having some serious connection and something intense is happening.  But when every dance is like that?  Well they can't all be serious and intense right?  No one has serious intense passionate dances every time they dance.  So he must just be putting it on...

Now I can't know for sure because I'm not in Spencer's brain.  But if ever there was a person who really was having (or at least trying to have) the intense passionate dance every time he dances, it is Spencer.  Or, to put it another way, he is willing to commit himself 100% to any given dance and to feel it with no fear of looking stupid or...melodramatic.  He is earnestly passionate in his dancing.

And that is why I wanted to dance Favorite Song with him.  Because when I dance with Spencer I get to be earnestly passionate, too.  When you know your partner will match you moment for moment, no matter where you go, it is one of the most liberating things you can experience dancing.  It gives you a level of safety and confidence in your dancing that elevates your movement beyond your actual ability.  It makes it possible to have exactly the dance you wanted to have to your favorite song (and anyone who has ever experienced "expectation vs. reality" disappointment will, if they take a moment to think about it, understand how significant that actually is).

Now, I want you to reread that last paragraph, but replace all the dancing words with relationship words:

And that is why I wanted to date him.  Because when I'm with him I get to be earnestly passionate, too.  When you know your partner will match you moment for moment, no matter where you go, it is one of the most liberating things you can experience in a relationship.  It gives you a level of safety and confidence in the relationship that elevates your emotional vulnerability beyond your actual ability.  It makes it possible to have exactly the relationship you wanted to have with your significant other.

It works pretty well, doesn't it.  Try it with anything at all that involves any sort of relationship with two people and I suspect it will still work equally well.  Because the core of why I love dancing with Spencer doesn't actually have anything to do with his specific dancing.  It's about who Spencer is as a person, which is a person who is earnest without fear of judgement.

 Earnest.

When you hear that word you probably think of the delightful Oscar Wilde play "The Importance of Being Earnest".  You should.  It's a great play (the movie with Colin Firth and Rupert Everett is also great).  But that play is actually a satire about the lack of earnestness (earnesty?) conveyed by people of the time.

Because western society has actually been suffering a drought of earnesty (I'm gonna go ahead and use it cause the OED says it's a word...albeit one that hasn't been used since the 1500's) that has gradually been intensifying since around the turn of the last century.  In the wake of the first and then the second Great War society was faced with a crisis of philosophy, culture, and identity.  Faith came under fire as people wondered how any god they had ever heard of could have let these atrocities happen.  Institutions and authority that had previously been inviolable were questioned.  And the continuing progression of time and events has only reinforced the trend.  Looking at all the "isms," from Modernism to Post-Modernism, including absurdism, existentialism, and nihilism, you can see the decay of western society's moral convictions.  That is not to say that morality was lost; rather the infrastructure of morality was lost.  We didn't stop believing that there was a "right" and a "wrong" (well, sort of...) but we lost our conviction that we understood what they were or who made that decision.  I've said before that World War II is a war that could never happen in today's Western World.  We lack the conviction for it.

But as we lost our conviction and our ability to definitively know things we found a great big gaping hole in our collective world view. And as a society we've come up with plenty of things to fill that hole.  You have the rise of the cult of rationalism--"I believe only in what can be rationally and verifiably proven".  You have the obstinately faithful--"the more archaic you prove my beliefs to be the more desperately I will cling to them".  But most of all I think society has filled the hole with apathy--"It was too hard to decide what was right and what to believe in so instead I simply stopped caring."
*Disclaimer: At this point my brain is seething with counter-arguments, exceptions, tangential points to make, and a million other things...but as this is a blog post, not an academic paper, I'm resolutely going to ignore them all.  I just had to acknowledge that they're there*

Somehow caring about things has become unfashionable.  I can think of no better way to describe this than, somewhat counter-intuitively, to invoke this infamous quote

Nerd culture has become strangely in vogue over the last couple of years as people have, much like the quote above declares, realized that it is a society in which it is still acceptable to care about things.  But I can't help but notice a few things about that.  First...why on earth do we have to be told that it is ok to care about things?  Why do we have to proudly (or not proudly) label ourselves "Nerd" before it is ok to be enthusiastic?  Second, even within the world of nerdly enthusiasm we have adopted a sort of reflexive, self-aware lexicon that allows us to distance ourselves from our enthusiasm.  If you're feeling brave, take a brief trek through the wilds of tumblr, imgur, or reddit fandom communities.  Nerds don't talk about feelings, they talk about their "feels".

You don't get excited, you "squee".

You don't care about a relationship between two characters, you "ship" them.

It's like nerds have to prove that they're aware that they care about these things more than they're necessarily supposed to.  Or like their feelings for their nerd-topic of choice are separate from their real, more reasonable emotions about real life.  And lastly, is the compartmentalizing of enthusiasm to "nerdy" things just another attempt to strip passion, enthusiasm, and conviction from the rest of our lives?  If nerds are the ones who are allowed to be "unironically enthusiastic about stuff", then what about the rest of the world--the ones who don't self-identify as "nerds".  Are they not "allowed" to be passionate?  Or must their enthusiams be cloaked in the ubiquitous coping mechanism of our post-modern world: irony.  Things you can't like openly you can like "ironically".  I can't decide if irony is the bane of modern society or its saving grace...

And now...are you ready for it?  Now I'm going to bring us full circle.  Back to my friend Spencer.  Who dances passionately every single dance.  I described him as being earnest.  Because I think that earnestness is the opposite of apathy.  It is certainly the opposite of irony.  Spencer does not dance ironically, though when we watch him we suspect that he does.  He is earnest.  In his dancing, in his conversation, and in his interactions with life and people.  And though I am a part of this nerdy, ironic, post-modern world of apathy and cynicism, when I dance with Spencer I get to let go of my protective shell of never being too invested in anything and be unabashedly passionate.  Not passionate in a nerdy way, that makes fun of itself as it revels in its feels.  Passionate in a completely authentic and up front way.  A way that we can't help but make fun of when we see it because we can't imagine that such simple, upfront and un-nuanced emotion exists anymore in this world.  That is earnestness.  And even if I make the occasional joke at its expense, and I don't think I'll ever be able to claim that I am a perfectly earnest individual, I have to stand up for earnestness.  Because when I dance earnestly with Spencer I am completely happy.  And I think that has to count for something.

My story...

A few days ago I posted a link on facebook to a blog post from the website FreeBYU.org.  As the site was created by and maintained in large part by one of my best friends, I've become more involved in their movement than I likely would have otherwise.  So I came across these two profiles: Travis and Tucker.  I know both of these guys, but I had not previously heard their story in terms of the church.  Reading their stories, so similar to so many other stories I've heard, made me want to try and put my own experience into words.

When I was younger I had this reputation for being quite a scriptorian.  Whenever we'd play games in primary revolving around Book of Mormon stories my team would always turn to me when it was our turn.  And I almost never disappointed.  Clearly I had a deep love of the scriptures.  Or, something neither I nor anyone else around me considered, I might instead just have an amazing ability to recall stories.  Years and classes later, after being the go-to student to summarize the reading we were all assigned for homework last week, I've come to believe it was most likely that latter explanation.  Because one thing I don't remember growing up is ever doing a single thing to deserve that reputation I had.  I mean, I read my scripture with some regularity because my mom made me bookmarks and charts and any number of other devices to remind me to do so.  But I don't recall ever particularly loving them.

I can remember one and a half times in my life when I've ever felt what could be called The Spirit.  The first was on some teenaged birthday (perhaps my sixteenth? I don't have the journal from that time to verify).  It was late enough in my life that my grandma was already starting to show the earliest signs of dementia.  She and my grandpa had given me a card with some money, perhaps $20, and as I laid in bed that night I had one of my first ever panic attacks as I worried over whether or not they could afford to give me that money and what was going to happen to them both as they continued getting older and their lives continued getting harder.  I was so afraid for them, and I felt so helpless to do anything about either their futures or my own current anxiety.  And though I cannot now remember the actual feeling (and I am actually often tempted to discount my memory of what happened), I do know that that night I felt comforted.  I was finally able to stop worrying, trust that my grandparents would be ok, and fall asleep.

The other time, the one I call a "half" time, was when I was about 20.  I was living with my dad and my step mother and my two step brothers and I was, all things considered, not in a great place in my life.  I'd come home from my study abroad completely broke and I made the decision to leave school for a year and try to earn money.  In retrospect I can say without reservation that it was the wrong decision, though a few good things did come from it.  So I spent a year and a half living with family, working at Target, and literally doing nothing else with myself.  I would wake up between 11 and 1 every day and surf the internet till I had to go to work.  I would work from 3 to 11 and then come home and stay up till 3 or 4 or 5 watching movies or TV shows.  I avoided my family and had almost zero social interaction.  Literally the only good things in my life were my cat and my ward.  I loved that ward (and the cat, but that's not relevant to this story).  And it was eventually my ward and my bishop that helped me get back on my feet.  I started thinking about serving a mission.  I was nearing the age and I can't even count the number of times I'd heard that if I wasn't married by 21 it was my duty to serve a mission.  I talked to my bishop about it, and we discussed the preparations I would need to make for a mission to happen.  I knew I didn't feel like I was spiritually "fit" enough for a mission yet, but I was hopeful that I could become so.  But as I considered the mission I kept thinking about school.  I was thinking about all my friends and how I was already a year behind them now.  If I went on a mission I'd be another year and half on top of that.  Basically all my friends would be done by the time I got back.  So one day I was praying about whether or not I should go on a mission or I should go back to school.  Now, depending on who you talk to either I just had a moment of clarity or I received an answer to my prayers.  Either way, I realized that when making my decision it was ok for me to factor in what I wanted to do.  School and mission were both good, worthy choices; this wasn't an issue of right or wrong.  So I wasn't somehow sinning to consider what I wanted to do as I made the decision.  And what I wanted to was to go back to school and all my friends.  Which is what I ended up doing.

If you ask me right now to tell you about all the times I've felt the spirit, those are the two stories I'd come up with.  I would also tell you one more.

The actual decision to come back to Provo was somewhat abrupt and I ended up moving into the first place I could find.  I moved down in the middle of the summer of 2008 and I lived in the place I found through winter semester of 2009.  I can't tell you exactly when this event occurred besides sometime while I lived in that house.  Essentially, one night I had a...spiritual breakdown shall we call it?  It began simply with loneliness.  I've always been susceptible to the latenight lonelies.  But that night it got worse and worse.  I remembered all those New Era articles I read about how other people had felt lonely and then they prayed and they "felt the arms of [their] dear Savior surround them and His love fill them."  So I asked God to let me feel that love.  Let me feel those arms around me.  I didn't feel anything at all.  And as I waited to feel the love I'd been promised was there waiting for me I started to ask myself a question.  It was the question that I think a lot of other people my age are also asking themselves.  What if none of it is true?  What if it is all just a big lie, or manipulation, or even just a well-intentioned wish?  What then?  I think I can say that it was the worst night of my life.  Because as I asked myself that question, I also asked God.  The God who, in all my twenty-some years of life had only had anything to say to me maybe two times.  And all this time I'd been ok with that.  I knew I wasn't good enough or devout enough to warrant the sort of constant spiritual intervention that I'd heard about other people having.  I didn't blame God for thusfar leaving me be.  But that night was different.  I needed something, anything at all.  I would have been content with a brusque "get over yourself" even.  I just wanted the tiniest shred of reassurance that my entire life hadn't been built around the world's greatest self-sustaining con.  I eventually cried myself out and fell asleep exhausted.

I woke up the next day with the the question in my head "What now?"  What was I supposed to do?  I'd been let down by God.  I had asked and He had said nothing.  But on the other hand...I had survived.  I'd made it through that awful night, and, thankfully, in the light of day I didn't feel the same passionate anguish I'd felt the night before.  I was just confused.  I didn't know what was supposed to happen.

A few days later in one of my classes we were assigned to read a book of poetry called The Stream and the Sapphire by Denise Levertov.  In it I found this poem:

Suspended
I had grasped God's garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The 'everlasting arms' my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummetted.

I have never ever cared for poetry, but that poem practically slapped me in the face when I read it.  There it was.  I had grasped at God's garment that night and my hands had slipped.  But what she said appealed to me.  "For though I claw at empty air and feel nothing, no embrace, I have not plummeted."  Neither had I.  I had made it through my night of pain and abandonment and I came out the other side.

There were many more hours of thought that went into it, but this is where I ended up.  God didn't answer me.  Not even when I was desperately begging Him to do so.  I could interpret that two ways.  God couldn't or wouldn't answer me because He either doesn't exist or doesn't care, or He didn't answer me for reasons of His own that I don't know but trust to ultimately be for my own good.  I have at least one friend who, upon reading this, will quickly point out to me that those two options are actually the exact same thing, except one includes me basically making things up to make myself feel better.  And to him I say yes.  He's exactly right.  Because those two options ended up being a microcosm of my entire attitude toward religion.  Which is this:  Either God doesn't exist and everything I've been taught and believed in my entire life is a lie and I've been wasting all my time and energy on nothing more than really persistent myths.  OR.  It's all true and there are things I don't understand and probably never will and I accept them and try to figure things out as best I can.  Those may not be the options for everyone, but that's what they were to me.

So I made a decision.  I chose to believe.  I chose to tell myself what may well be a straight up lie because when I weighed my options, my life looked better through that lens.  In the church there is a lot of talk about faith.  I doubt a sacrament meeting goes by that doesn't have at least one mention of it.  Faith, we are told, is the foundation of our testimonies, and through it we progress to knowledge.  Well, knowledge is something that I have accepted to be pretty much beyond my reach.  Because I just don't think I could claim knowledge unless God or the Spirit told me something straight out.  And that doesn't appear to be something that's going to happen.  But if I'm being honest, I have to say that I wouldn't even classify what I have as faith.  What I have is hope.  Hope is the very lowest rung on the spiritual ladder in my head.  I have hope that this church I've committed myself to is true (though certainly not perfect).  I have hope that one day I'll understand the world and my place in it.  I have hope that God loves me.

That was five and a half years ago.  Things haven't been easy since then.  I've seen a lot of friends go through similar experiences to mine, but with very different endings.  They couldn't accept hope as a good enough reason to stick with the church.  I don't blame them.  In fact, I often worry that the real reason I stay with the church is simply because I don't care enough about topics that should be much more important to me.  Maybe I just lack enough conviction one way or the other.  It's actually a pretty constant issue in my mind.  But whether that is the case or not, I will say that I have thusfar stuck with my decision.  I may have doubts and questions and hurts and plenty of issues with the church...but I have decided to stick with it.  I think the hardest thing for me these days is jealousy of my time.  Lacking the devout conviction of my fellow saints I find it difficult to sacrifice my time so willingly.  I'm working on that.  But I will also say that having an...academic? reasoned?  well, either way, a far less emotional attachment to the church has had its upsides. I think I have been able to offer a supportive and understanding ear to my friends who have suffered through the disillusionment and pain that comes with a lost testimony (at least I really hope so). I am able to hear a lot more criticism of the church without getting angry or defensive (unless that criticism is idiotic and unfair ;).  And I am able to look at the church more objectively and see places it needs improvement without writing it off entirely.  And that is, I think, the biggest "blessing" that has come from my story thusfar.  Because if the ones with questions and concerns just leave, and all that is left are the devout and unquestioning, then how will anything ever change?  Each side serves it's purpose, and you need both of them.  So I am grateful, I guess, that I can be a questioner.

I told my bishop an abbreviated version of this story a few weeks ago.  It is something I've mostly kept to myself.  I've been ashamed of the fact that I can't claim to have faith or knowledge.  It is hard not to think that, if I was a better person--a better Mormon--I would have those things.  But my bishop, instead of calling me to repentance, said "I think that is a great story."  Small as it was, that little bit of acceptance was so comforting to me.  It inspired me to try and look at my story in a different light--to recast it from a failure to a success.  It's hard to even write that.  And maybe I'm not quite at success level.  But as I've gone back through it all and written it all out, I have been able to see more goodness in my story than I ever have before.  Enough that I can hope to call it a success one day...

Am I doing nothing?

First of all, if you know what "TLDR" means, then this post may not be for you...

I'm going to post some links.  Please read all the articles before you read the rest of this post.

The most hated man on the internet

The Village Voice profile of Hunter Moore

Taking on the Revenge Porn industry

And as a reward for slogging through all of that, here is a tumblr called "Faith in Humanity Restored" full of lovely things people do for each other.  Take some time and feel better...

Maybe it's just cause my emotions have been especially close to the surface lately, but as I read those articles I felt my soul curl up in the fetal position and start rocking back and forth while moaning.  See, my life is spent wrapped up in the soft, warm cocoon of good people and Mormon society--which, while certainly not perfect, is made up primarily of good people trying to become better (at least in my experience).  Thusfar I have not been forced into a personal acquaintance with the horrifying realities of the world in which we live.  I can, if I choose, live my life in innocence of the things people in the world do to one another.

But then I read articles like those above.

I have an overwhelming sadness for the experiences of these women and what the cruel actions of others have put them through.  I am angry that the wonders of modern technology have been corrupted into a means for people to indulge in absolutely the worst parts of their nature.  I am hurt that my brothers and sisters can treat each other so poorly.  And I must confess, I feel so much pity for these people posting these pictures, and most of all for Hunter Moore, this poor poor young man who has so willingly abandoned his humanity in the pursuit of fame (infamy is a better word) and money, and who is, as yet, so completely unaware of what the real cost is.

But even more than all that, I feel guilty.

I feel guilty that I live such a serene and unmolested life.  I feel guilty that women who are likely better people than I am are being put through something like that.  And I feel guilty that, not just in this situation, but that in all of the sufferings and pains of this world I do so little.  And most of all, for the knowledge that, despite all that guilt and all the wretchedness in the world, I will never be a crusader like Charlotte Laws has been.  As I read her account of her crusade against revenge porn (it seems so inadequate even to ask "why is this a thing?") I am so in awe of her.  She is absolute evidence that one person can make a difference.  She is a fighter--a true warrior in a world of cowardice, anonymity, and apathy.  And I will never be like her.

I once wrote a blog post about what I call my "small life".  Here it is.  I was angry when I wrote it.  I'd been having a conversation with a friend of mine in which he repeatedly belittled all of the choices I had made about how I want to live.  I wanted to defend my decisions!  I have the right to live my small life and be happy!  And maybe that is true.  In that post I talk about Washingtonian style activism.  That's the sort of activism where you focus on your little corner of life and you work as hard as you can to improve it.  In my head that translates to worrying about me, my friends, and my family (both current and future).  I do the best I can to make sure that those people are taken care of, and in turn, they all do the same for their circles, and thus it spreads.  And I said I was ok with that sort of effect on the world.

But then I read about Charlotte Laws.  She is a Duboisian if ever there was one.  And as I read her story, I started to question my Washingtonian philosophies.  Because reading stories about digital rape and invasions of privacy, they're just the tip of the iceberg.  What these articles are really doing is forcing me out of my cocoon of safety and comfort to see the world around me.  Because horrible as this story was, it is only the smallest fraction of the awful things that are happening in the world.  And I am not exaggerating when I say that trying to contemplate all of the problems humanity faces physically makes me ill.  I feel nauseated and achey.  Which is why I espouse Washingtonian activism.  Because I simply cannot face all of that hurt and suffering and damage, and focusing only on my small corner of life is the only way I can manage.

But I don't know if that's good enough.

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" *

It's a cliche quote, but still true.  Am I doing nothing, but dressing it up in a fancy costume of something so that I don't feel bad?  Because imagine if we were all Charlotte Laws.  What if we all stood up as warriors against the triumph of evil?  How much more quickly would the world change?  If nothing else, a poor misguided soul like Hunter Moore wouldn't think that his ticket to success was to be a "professional life-ruiner"...


*possibly a quote from Edmund Burke, possibly from Leo Tolstoy

Because learning without creation is pointless

I've been trying to write a story for the last couple of weeks.  On a good day I write about 1,000 words.  Prolific I am not.  It's because, surprisingly enough, I find fiction writing to be exhausting in a way that writing here is not.  Writing on my blog is casual--just me spitting out whatever is rattling around in my head.  Writing a story is different--it needs to be "right".  And finding the right words to explain the right actions in the right way leaves me exhausted after just a scene or two.  Which is ok.  Because there isn't actually a time line on anything and if I it takes me till October of 2015 (which is what the NaNoWriMo website is predicting based off my current rate of writing) then...ok.  Why not?

oh, it's actually November of next year...hooray!

But, it also means that today I just wanted to take a break and do some writing that wasn't quite so difficult for me.  Perhaps later I will write another scene in my story.  But for now, it is the mental equivalent of sweatpants and chocolate time for my brain.

Miley...I think you're doing that wrong...

So let's talk about the usefulness of education.  In my last post I mentioned how I'm adjusting to adult, non-married life.  I talked about my recent interest in researching fairy tales and how I questioned whether or not reading arcane academic articles was a better use of my time than perusing facebook and buzzfeed.  I left it open ended, implying I wasn't completely sure about the answer.

Well, inasmuch as I am capable of being completely sure of anything (I'm not), I will say that I am sure.

With qualifications.

Whether it is my Mormonism or just me, I have to say that educating myself, even about the most obscure and useless of topics is an improvement over entertainment-grazing the internet for babies and kittens (which is not to say that there isn't a place for babies and kittens and gif-fests).  If for no other reason than that the latter requires absolutely nothing from your brain.  And if my primary pass-time is something that I can do equally well when I am literally half asleep, there is something wrong with my pass-time.  Hence, I declare obscure research a winner!

But frankly, it's not actually a huge step up to go from facebook to obscure research.  There's a last step missing.  And that is where my qualifications come in.  (guys.....I'm sorry, but I'm having a really hard time focusing on the rest of my post with that gif repeating above me over and over...)

Ok, refocusing.  What I'm talking about is synthesis.  This is a thing that, ideally, you learned about in high school.  If you didn't learn about it in high school then I am praying that you learned about it in college.  But since I've been a college TA, I know that many many people did not, so I will give a quick summary, though I'm pretty confident that none of you, my 12 lovely readers, are these people.  Anneke, if you're reading this, bear with a non-education major as I try to explain this.  There are different levels of learning, each one implying a certain depth of understanding.  Because understanding is not the same thing as knowing.  Think of it....think of it like acting.  Imagine a scale, and on one end you have Antonio Banderas learning his first Holywood part phonetically because he didn't speak English at the time.  He knew his lines, but he didn't understand them.  All he could do was repeat back exactly what he had memorized.  On the other end of the scale you have, um...someone like Robin Williams or Anthony Hopkins.  These are men who know their lines, know their characters, know the story, understand all those things, and using them, they riff and improvise and actually create more than what is in the script.  This is synthesis, and this is what is necessary to make education worthwhile.

hey look! A little picture about exactly my topic!

It is a hard lesson to learn, especially for those students who made it to college without learning it.  So many kids would email me or approach me in class to ask "Why didn't I get an A?  I covered all the study points."  Even setting aside my feelings on grade inflation, the most basic answer is that simply regurgitating a list of facts is not demonstrative of complete education.  It's Antonio Banderas speaking out sounds whose meanings he couldn't comprehend.  To show me that you actually understand what those facts mean you have to synthesize them into something greater than the constituent parts.  Tell me why those facts were significant.  Tell me why we're studying that story.  Tell me anything, as long as it shows that you've not just memorized the information, but actually digested it and comprehended its significance.  Be Anthony Hopkins disappearing into his character so that you forget that he isn't actually a terrifying madman in real life.  Be Robin Williams riffing so much during the making of Aladdin  that they could have made three movies on his material alone.

Which brings us back to research for research's sake.  It's true, pumping my brain full of facts is better than turning it off entirely and tucking it away in a corner.  But better still than that is taking all those facts and doing something with them.  In my case, right now, I am using my research to write my own version of one of my favorite fairy tales (I hope to adapt more in the future).  Sometimes I write quasi-scholarly analyses of stories or movies or books here on my blog.  Maybe I just tell my boss about how strange the stories are.  Whatever I do, about not just fairy tales but any other topic I research, the point is that once I've put the information in my brain I need to work with it.  If I don't, it might as well not be there in the first place, taking up space.  Because not only does synthesizing your knowledge demonstrate a deeper and more thorough understanding of it...it actually creates that understanding.

Synthetic thinking is a..."higher" level of thinking than consumptive.  It takes more work.  In practical terms that means that you just don't really do it without making yourself do it.  And you don't make yourself do it without a reason.  Now that reason may be simply because you enjoy it (that is why I write this blog).  But until I sit down and write a blog post about the importance of College Girl literature I don't actually fully understand that importance.  The bits and pieces of my thoughts are all floating around in my head but I've never taken the time or energy to straighten them all out and organize them and make something of them.  This is actually exactly what is happening when you're talking to someone and you explain something and they get all excited and exclaim "Exactly!  That's exactly what I think, you just put it so much more clearly!"  What they're actually saying is "I had all those bits of idea drifting around in my head, too, but I never sat down and put them all together like you have just done and I can recognize the idea all put together there in your words!"

If only more people understood the principle of synthesis I think the world as a whole would be a much better place.  Synthetic thinking leads to an understanding of and ability to both articulate and support one's own beliefs and ideals rather than a blind defensiveness.  It leads to developments of philosophy and art and science.  And the thing is, everyone is capable of it.  It's not a "smart" vs. "dumb" thing.  If you want to be that reductive you could, I suppose, argue that it is a "disciplined" vs. "indulgent" thing.  But even then, you can't expect someone to discipline their mind in a certain way if they have no understanding of what that way even is.

But maybe I've managed to explain it successfully here.  And maybe someone who didn't quite understand it will read this and then they will  (or maybe not...I'm not so optimistic about my writing/explaining abilities).  And then, just maybe, they will have the discipline to start trying to think this way.  And I suppose that if I can manage to inspire that series of events with my blog for just one person then that will be a good day's work.

Filling the time till I die...

So...post-college life.  As you all know, it kind of snuck up on me (sneaked?  really?  whatever, we're sticking with "snuck" because I'm a rebel).  I haven't had my moment of college closure.  Rather I've been doing a lot of thinking, and the conclusions I've come to are...depressing.  Especially for me specifically (that is, a single Mormon girl getting uncomfortably close to 30).  Growing up Mormon I never questioned that after college I'd be married and making/raising the babies.  But shoot!  I'm out of college and ain't no babies up in here.  And there aren't likely to be any for a while.  Suddenly I am faced with the realization that there is no guarantee that I'm going to get married.  I may not get to have the babies.  Don't worry...I'm still holding at bay the full-on panic of that thought.  But what I am doing is trying to figure out what an adult life is supposed to be full of if it isn't full of family.

The fact is, up till now I've been living my life like a video game (for lack of a better analogy).  I've had all these benchmarks that are like leveling up.  Start primary; level up.  Go to high school: level up.  College; level up.  Just like a video game, the goals have been clearly explained and set in front of me.  But graduating from college was pretty much the last level I could beat on my own.  Like I said, the next level has always been family...but I kind of need a partner for that one.  Which means that, for the first time in my life, while I do have a next level in mind, it has become a much more misty, on the horizon sort of thing rather than a planned, scheduled surety.  And maybe the next level I have in mind isn't even the right one!  Basically, my life has gone from Tetris™ to Myst™.  Lots of wandering around and exploring with only minimal actual game progress.

well, technically this is Riven. It had prettier worlds.  

So here I am, unable to level up, stuck exploring for secondary games and sub-challenges and easter eggs and any clue what I should be doing.  The big one I should be working on is a career.  After all, we Americans are all about our careers, right?  That's what TV tells me.  You all may remember that post a while back flirting with the idea of buying a bookstore.  Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending) that idea hasn't exactly progressed.  But I have been thinking a bit lately about my current job situation.  As I've said many times before, I absolutely love my job.  But I mentioned that I worry that perhaps part of the reason that I love it is that it is so safe and doesn't challenge me at all.  Honestly, I'm not really sure if there's anything wrong with that.  But I will admit that I'm starting to think maybe I should pull a resume together and at least have my ears open for any opportunities.

But that means that, for the time being, the sub-quest of Job is taken care of.  I have a job, achievement unlocked, plus 250 coins (per month)!  So what else should I do?

Well, the depressing truth is that life doesn't actually have clearly delineated quests, achievements, or levels anymore.  I don't have any more socially dictated benchmarks that can reassure me that my life is progressing.  All I have is an indeterminate length of time that ought to be filled before I die.  My job is to fill that time in the most worthwhile way that I can.

Quick story.  Way back in 2010 when I worked at Target, in a desperate attempt to find some way to keep my mind occupied, one day I started asking every person who came through my line which was their favorite fairytale between Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, and Cinderella, and why.  Sadly, I no longer have the exact results (though I remember them generally).  But I did come up with some really interesting anecdotal data.  At the time I came up with this great idea for a research project built on that data and I was legitimately excited about it (almost as excited as I still am about my epic Batman/V for Vendetta/Sense and Sensibility analysis).  However, all that actually got done was the research about one single fairytale that ended up as this blog post.  And there it ended.

it is absurd trying to find non-Disney images of these stories...

This week, as anyone who follows me on the fbook knows, I returned to my fairytales.  Unfortunately, I have no idea now what my great research project was going to be.  But I decided to go ahead and finish researching the history of the stories anyway.  I think it's fascinating and, who knows?  Maybe in the course of my research I'll remember the overall project?

 But mostly, it just seemed like a better way for me to spend my evenings than they way I have been--either drifting aimlessly in the directionless eddies of facebook and buzzfeed, or turning my brain entirely off on TV binges.  Surely there must be more value in learning than there is in comatose internet browsing....right?

I guess?

That is...yes.  I cannot accept that nearly vegetative clicking is on par with learning; even if that learning is pretty much without use or even reason.  Because that is what my research is.  I don't remember what that project was supposed to be, so as of now I'm just learning about early fairytales for no other reason than that I find them interesting.  And that's the problem.  My Mormon conditioning tells me that information and education are worthwhile for their own sake.  But another part of me keeps whispering that simply taking in information is...kind of a waste.  After all, what really is the difference between three hours of facebook status updates and buzzfeed articles vs three hours of JSTOR and wikipedia articles about 18th century marriage traditions and the literary tradition of the animal bridegroom?  Cause the facebook time is giving me information too.  I'm learning who is pregnant, who is engaged, who is hungry, and who is addicted to instagram.  So why do I feel less like I've "wasted" my evening after the JSTOR articles than the facebook?  Is that feeling justified?  Why?

baha! this came up when I googled "what's the point?"

I'm actually still working on these questions.  Because I feel like answering them will help me with the bigger question of where is my next level up.  Or rather, with no levels left to reach, what exactly am I supposed to be doing now in this game?  How should I be using the time I have?

I would legitimately like to know what you all think...