Old Nintendo Games

When Canon and I got Super Mario Bros. 2, it was just about the most exciting thing in the world. We were limited on Nintendo time back then, half-an-hour a day (I don’t remember if that was half-an-hour each or half-an-hour total…either way, thanks Mom, it probably saved us from becoming more of video game zombies than we already were).

When we went to bed that night, we pretended to fall asleep, waiting for mom and dad to go to sleep so we could sneak downstairs and play Mario all night. Around 2 in the morning, dad came bleary-eyed into the family room and told us to go to bed. I thought that was going to be the end of us, but he never mentioned it the next day. Good times…

Dreams…

I went with a friend the other day to get a tattoo–wait. She got a tattoo. I didn’t haha. We started talking about dreams and I asked the tattoo artist if he dreamt about tattooing people. (My boss at Quiznos explains our “One Dollar Sub Sale” to her boyfriend in her sleep.) He said that the most recurring one was that he would look down to see that he was tattooing without his latex gloves on. Then he said that sometimes he’d design tattooes in his dreams and that he actually designed his entire business card in a dream. I checked it out, it was all black with a white silhoette (sp?) of an ewok, because that’s the name he goes by. And there was a phone number on the bottom, but his name wasn’t on it anywhere. He explained that that was one of the vital parts of the dream, was that he wouldn’t put his name on there, just an Ewok silhouette “to weed out…” To weed out the customers that didn’t know him well enough to realize a card with an ewok on it was his? Haha. I’m not sure where he was going with that. At first I thought it was silly that a business person would try to weed out any kind of paying customer, but my friend had to schedule her appointment like, five weeks ahead of time because the guy was so booked. Which made me realize that an occupation that allows you to go by the name Ewok and weed out customers could actually be worth looking into… Just kidding. Sort of.

It all mostly reminded me of you though, Dane. It just seemed like something you would do, design a business card in a dream and then actually create it. I think about the conversations we used to have about lucid dreaming a lot. And I find that my best dreams are ones where I’m in a backyard and I’m running away from something so I choose a fence to jump over and I end up in a different backyard… I just get to explore everyone’s backyards in my dreams. It’s pretty awesome

The Rules: #3

#3: Show Nothing to your Friend that may affright him.

I wonder what sorts of things the writer of these rules was thinking about. I mean, this was 400 years ago. They didn’t have any horror flicks or youtube videos. Maybe the rule was designed to cover spiders, snakes, and severed heads.

“Wickedness Never Was Happiness”

Ever wonder if we interpret that scripture backwards? We usually hear it in the sense of, “If you’re wicked, you won’t be happy, so don’t be wicked!” But it could just as easily mean, “If you’re happy, then that’s a sign that you’re not wicked.” I think that, most of the time, that’s the more useful perspective.

Three Acts

The traditional three-act epic (think Star Wars or Lord of the Rings) starts with the good guys receiving a quest (act 1). Then the bad guys almost stop the good guys from completing their quest (act 2), and finally the good guys triumph over the bad guys (act 3).

In church we get the three-act epic as premortal-mortal-postmortal life, or sometimes it’s phrased in terms of creation-fall-atonement.

The three acts that are the most important to my life now are the wilderness, city, and garden acts. In the first act, things are simple but difficult (the wilderness). In the second act, things are complicated but convenient (the city). The third act is our attempt to take the best of both the wilderness and the city to create something new and beautiful.

At the family reunion, Jade and I were talking about our experiences with the church. Jade said, “Sometimes I miss being in church, but I don’t want to go back to the way things were.” I sympathize, and I think that’s really insightful. She and I had similar church experiences growing up. It was hard having guilt and obligation as the primary motivating forces in life, and I don’t want to go back to that either. But I do want to keep the beautiful parts. That’s why I try to build the green hill.

The Rules: #2

#2: When in Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body, not usually Discovered.

In case you ever wondered why moms are obligated to tell their kids, “Stop scratching down there!” This one also covers picking your nose. The part about “not usually Discovered” gives us echoes of modesty from hundreds of years ago. It probably also meant not to scratch your ankles.

The Rules: #1

About 400 years ago, some people (French Jesuits, says this site) came up with the Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation. There are 110 rules in all.

#1: Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present.

There you go. Every action. That’s a lot of actions. Let them all be done. With Respect.

A New Decade

2:15 on a Saturday afternoon is probably as good a time for reflection as any. I’ve just turned 30, and that’s kind of a milestone.

As I see it, my 20’s were my “checklist years”. The decade started out like a scavenger hunt. I had a list of things I wanted to do. Some were big things — “serve a mission”, “finish college”, “travel the world”, etc. — and some were small things like, “get a butterscotch milkshake from the Toiyabe Cafe in Austin, Nevada”.

My 30’s, in contrast, I hope will be a time of focused development. I explored a lot of different fields during my 20’s, so many that I couldn’t reasonably seriously pursue them all. Now I want to prioritize, to identify the areas that have been most rewarding, and cultivate those things.

• “Live a simple, rural lifestyle” — I used to dream of living self-subsistently on a farm. As a  BYU student, I took a wilderness survival class and even spent a couple weeks with nomads in Mongolia, just to see what it would be like to get away from the world. I’ve discovered that it’s not for me. The simple life is very time-intensive. Modern amenities may make life complicated, but they also make it convenient. My free time is important to me, so I think the dreams of a farmer’s life are behind me now.
• “Travel the world and live abroad” — One of my great “checklist” items was spending a summer travelling through Asia, from St. Petersburg to Beijing. What has surprised me since then is how rarely I recall having gone on the trip. It’s a fun conversation piece, and I’m proud of having done it, but I don’t feel that traveling the world is going to be a priority in the coming years.
• “Make dance a part of my life” — I graduated from BYU with a bachelor’s degree in dance. In contrast to my experience with travelling, dance has had a huge effect on me. From getting out of bed in the morning to interacting with people at school and managing projects at work, my dance training continues to inform nearly every aspect of my life.
• “Spend time with friends and family” — This was just about the most important thing in the world for me over the last decade, and I don’t expect that to change in the coming years. This is the reason the green hill is so important to me.
• “Be engaged in creative projects” — I enjoy both creating and consuming artistic works, from music to writing to web design and board games. The expressive/creative world is central to who I am, and will certainly be a priority for me in the next decade.

I could lengthen the list, but that’s enough of me for now. How about you — what have you been and done, what has worked out well, and what were the dead ends?

Geeks Again

I was recently called to be the priests quorum teacher in our ward. This means that I get to teach the 16 to 18-year-old young men at church. It also means that I get to attend the Wednesday night youth activities.

The young men in our ward are pretty typical of young men in the church: vibrant, fun, and into sports, music, and video games. They are a lot like the kids that I knew at church back when I was in the Young Men’s program.

I didn’t connect really closely with any of the other kids at church. I was always more comfortable hanging out with my fellow geeks at school.

Hanging out with the young men here, I was kind of surprised to discover that it’s still basically the same way. I mean, between work and school, I’ve made a conscious effort over the last ten years to bridge the geek/non-geek gap. I understand how important it is to be able to associate with a wide range of people, but it seems I haven’t come as far as I had thought.

A while back I wrote about the difference between geeks and non-geeks. I’ve been thinking more about it since then, and have come up with a couple of other differences.

1. Coming home from work/school to an empty house, the non-geek will quickly go out and find someone to do something with. The geek will happily enjoy the opportunity to pursue one of his own interests without interruption.
2. (Related to #1) Geeks have “default hobbies” — something that they’re into, and will channel their spare time towards. This is why geeks aren’t into extracurricular sports/leadership/etc. All those team things take time away from the important stuff.
3. Geeks take time to think about the difference between geeks and non-geeks

Reverence

I received an email today, entitled “Reverence is more than just quietly sitting…”, that included the following quote on reverence:

Reverence has more to do with politics than with religion. We can easily imagine religion without reverence; we see it, for example, wherever religion leads people into aggressive war or violence. But power without reverence — that is a catastrophe for all concerned. Power without reverence is aflame with arrogance, while service without reverence is smoldering toward rebellion. Politics without reverence is blind to the general good and deaf to the advice from people who are powerless. And life without reverence? Entirely without reverence?

That would be brutish and selfish, and it had best be lived alone.

-Paul Woodruff

I think that we in the church misunderstand reverence because we teach it as an action when it’s really a relationship. In other words, you can only be “reverent” in relation to something you “revere”. When we learn reverence in primary, we are not taught that our reverence has an object, and that it is the object of our reverence that guides our actions; rather, we are taught the forms of reverence in a vacuum.

The problem (if there is a problem) is structural. There are two approaches to reverence, both of which are directly opposed to modern sensibilities.

The first approach is reverence-as-worship. Reverence-as-worship says “You [the object of my reverence] are greater than me. Your will is greater than my will. Your wisdom is greater than my wisdom. What you command, I will do, even though it seem wrong or foolish to me.” It establishes a master/subordinate relationship between the reverant and the reverer.

This type of reverence relies on the social doctrine of vassalage, where a subordinate is no longer morally culpable for his actions. He becomes an agent of his master, and his actions are ascribable to his master. Our society is increasingly wary of this sort of relationship, as it leads to religious fundamentalism, wherein adherents deny personal responsibility for reprehensible choices.

The second approach is reverence-toward-an-ideal. In this case, the object of reverence is not a person or ideology, but rather a perfection. This is the kind of reverence Paul Woodruff calls “the well-developed capacity to have the feelings of awe, respect, and shame when these are the right feelings to have”. Our cultural opposition to this kind of reverence grows out of cultural relativism. One hundred years ago it might have been tenable to call western classical music the pinnacle of artistic musical expression. Today that kind of belief is considered ethnocentric or parochial.

My point is that the concept reverence is intimately connected to the concepts of truth and beauty. Reverence, in the traditional sense, requires either an absolute truth (reverence-as-worship) or an absolute beauty (reverence-toward-an-ideal) as an object. I lament the modern decline of reverence, but I am grateful for the expanded views of truth and beauty we enjoy today. Forced to choose between the two, I will take the latter.