He really was the man in the mirror: the person who embodied and reflected our culture's destructive, misguided desire for a sort of false, impossible and caricature-like "beauty," which actually kills rather than encourages creativity, even in the most talented. This "beauty" is barren and sterile and it screams of self-loathing.

It's very, very sad.

But here's something productive and fecund that announces a healthy belief in growth and wise self-confidence: an essay in The Nation about how hip, cool, progressive and all-round AWESOME SLC is.

Lisa Duggan, professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University writes that

Last fall I lived in Salt Lake City. As a leftist and New York City dyke, I had expected to find a conservative city and a quietly assimilationist gay community. Instead, I was repeatedly blown away by the progressive politics and outright queerness of the capital city, which is about 40 percent Mormon.

Duggan notes that SLC "is home to a floridly queer and unusually politically unified LGBT community" and discusses why it was a great place to spend the aftermath of the passing of California's Prop 8.

Please check it out.

Yeah, I thought, she has a point. It is kinda boring. I could tell I was kinda bored because I would get up and walk into the kitchen without pausing the dvd player so I wouldn't miss anything. Occasionally, I would fast forward through something extra tedious.

It just didn't seem like a big deal. In grad school you get really used to reading and watching boring stuff all the way to the end. It got to where if something was merely boring, instead of, say, boring and misogynist, or boring and irrelevant, or boring and riddles with errors of grammar and logic, I was grateful.

Bore me, in other words, just a little bit, and I'll go along for the ride. Bore me AND offend me, and I'm gone.

Which is what happened with True Blood. It moved from being just kinda boring to being kinda boring AND horrifically violent and gory and mean-spirited. All but a few moments of Episode Ten depicted the characters being completely HORRIBLE to each other. I fast-forwarded through more than I ever had before, and at the end, I felt I'd been assaulted. I was heartsick and nauseated, and I needed a bath as much as the characters who ended up drenched in blood--and I mean drenched in blood, having taking a blood shower, with it saturating hair, face, nostrils and clothes.

The same thing happened with another tv series I dabbled in recently, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Netflix recommended it, based on my interest in To the Manor Born and Yes, Minister (which I never got around to blogging about), and I thought, what the hell--particularly since the library had it and I could keep the entire show for two weeks, since I had a feeling I wouldn't race through it. I made it through the first season and was interested enough (in a horrified sort of way) in the sexism, racism and general hardcore weirdness of 1970s British television to look past the boringness of the show. Season II was much the same--until, two eps before the season ended, the main character decided that he was going to ruin his life, AND everyone else's in the process, because he was bored.

And I couldn't put up with that. I'd been willing to go along with the sorta boring depiction of his sorta boring life; I didn't feel obligated to destroy the dvd or my tv or anything, just because this guy bored me. So when he decided to engage in wanton destruction, just 'cause he was bored, I took the dvd out of the player, replaced it in the case, and took the whole thing back to the library. I didn't even glance at the third season or the extras. I was done.

I guess that's one reason I could make it through the whole season of Dollhouse: It only annoyed me; it didn't annoy me AND bore me.

It's kinda sad, really. I should have higher standards. I might work on that.

In the meantime, I have the entire first season of Gossip Girl from the library. We'll see how I do with that.

1. You graduate from high school or get a GED.

2. You graduate from college with decent grades.

3. You take the GRE.

4. You apply to universities and get accepted somewhere.

5. You do coursework for a few years.

6. You pass your comprehensive exams.

7. You do a lot of research and write a prospectus for a dissertation.

8. You write the dissertation.

9. You defend the dissertation.

10. You get a diploma.

It generally takes somewhere from four to fourteen years, and you change considerably over the process--supposedly you mature and your ideas become more complex, and you also get poorer and more cynical and tired of living without decent insurance. But after that, you're considered an expert in something--not necessarily something important or relevant to your life in general, but something. You even have a title to demonstrate that.

In other words, you have to earn the degree, and there are tests and requirements to help ensure that people do. And while some PhDs are more prestigious than others, the power or relevance of any is greatly limited outside of certain contexts. Having a PhD in art history doesn't help you make wise decisions about retirement investments. Plus, most people don't really give a shit that you decided to go to school forever.

Here's how you get the priesthood in the Mormon church, which supposedly is this great power that can affect almost every aspect of the priesthood holder's life:

1. You're born male.

3. When you turn 12, you're made a deacon in the Aaronic priesthood, provided you go to go church from time to time and aren't a juvenile sex offender, though there's some wiggle room on that last bit. Twenty-five years ago or so, the bishop asked the congregation of my home ward to sustain the decision to give the priesthood to a kid in the ward. Everyone agreed that this was completely appropriate--except for my mother, who raised her hand to say that she was opposed this. It caused quite a stir--it had never happened before in our ward that anyone could remember. After the meeting she was asked why she objected, and she pointed out that the boy they wanted to give the priesthood to had been caught molesting his neighbor's four-year-old daughter. Eventually the leaders agreed that that was a reason to withhold giving the guy the priesthood--but it never occurred to them themselves. He was 12; he was male; his parents brought him to church; why wouldn't he be made a deacon?

4. When you turn 14, provided you still attend church and aren't in juvey, you are made a teacher in the Aaronic priesthood.

5. When you turn 16, if you're still attending church and not in juvey, you are made a priest in the Aaronic priesthood. It's desirable that you adhere to other commandments of the church, like not fornicating or stealing or getting drunk or high, but I'm sure I'm not the only person who knew her male friends were getting rip-roaring drunk or stoned on Saturday night, then blessing the sacrament with raging hangovers on Sunday morning. (Wearing sunglasses and falling asleep while you're on the stand before the congregation is a pretty good giveaway.)

6. When you turn 18, provided you're still attending church, not a felon, and express a desire/willingness to have it, you graduate to the Melchizedek priesthood and become an elder. That's right: you're made an elder at 18, which confuses a lot of people who quite logically assume that "elder" means "dude who is older."

7. You'll probably stay an elder for a good long while, but eventually, when you're almost old enough to be a REAL elder, you might be made a 70 or a high priest.

Anyway, the point is, being made a deacon, teacher, priest or elder isn't a recognition of anything special about a person, except for HIS gender. You don't EARN the priesthood if you're male; you can only FORFEIT your right to it, by breaking a commandment (or rather, by getting caught). And as homophobic as the church is, it's striking that being gay doesn't automatically disqualify a man from the priesthood; you can BE gay and have the priesthood; you just can't DO gay.

Getting the priesthood doesn't require any special wisdom or goodness or maturity; instead, it's supposed to CONFER those things. Except that it doesn't, as GMA notes in this comment, writing,

So when you?re ordained and nothing changes, and they tell you that you have the priesthood and it?s the most important thing in the universe but you don?t feel anything, you start to question what this whole thing is all about...

Instead, it makes it harder, not easier, to be righteous, and even Joseph Smith recognized that when he wrote "We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion" (D&C 121:39).

The real point of the priesthood is that it's A) magic and B) the way you show who's in charge.

It's this mysterious magic power that works when men who have it put their magic hands on the magically-receptive heads of others. It's how the sick are healed and evil spirits are driven out and spaces sanctified. The only ritual accessory needed is a little oil to put on the heads of people getting blessings. Other than that, you don't need fire, or smoke, or special rocks, or anything.

It's not surprising that Joseph Smith would claim and confer a special magic power, since he was always interested in magic.

But the fact that this power is magic means it doesn't have to be A) just or B) logical.

Magic gets to pick who it exercises it. Magic doesn't have to explain to mere mortals how it works. Magic only works as magic, in fact, if it's mysterious and unexplainable. If its functions and processes are understood, it's called science. (There's my undergraduate education coming in handy again: I picked that insight up from a book I read in 1985, called Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances A Yates.)

The priesthood sucks because it works without accountability to human beings. It doesn't have to meet their needs, or be fair, or be earned, or be monitored, or be understood. In fact, it maintains its mystery and its power by NOT doing those things, by being random and selective and illogical.

This is one more reason I don't want it, and think institutions should renounce it.

I began to wonder if it was the fact that I DIDN'T have the priesthood, and therefore DIDN'T have a certain respect for it, that has made me willing and able to call these guys by their first names. I wonder if men respect the authority of the priesthood more because they have it.

In 2002, Sunstone published an essay of mine in which I recount standing up in a zone conference and saying to my second (as opposed to my much cooler first) mission president, when he got Melchizedek on our asses and started issuing punitive, brutal directives, "President ___________, why are you doing this? This is stupid. It's wrong."

This was analogous to a private standing up during a briefing by a colonel about a military mission and saying, "Why are you commanding us to do these backasswards things? This is stupid. It's wrong."

In other words, it was a big fucking deal. Now, to my mission president's credit, although he responded by shutting down the meeting in order to shut me and everyone else up, he also admitted right then and there that I was RIGHT, and he never said another word about the horrible policies he had once wanted to institute.

We discussed the incident later, when I apologized. As I wrote in the essay,

"Well, mostly I was hurt," he replied. "I thought that you of all people understood me better than that. You should have known that it had nothing to do with you. When those elders started nitpicking about how to keep the rules in the most precise way possible, you should have just ignored them and me and sat and read your scriptures, and then when it was all over, you should've just gone about your business the way you wanted to. I know why you do what you do, and I wish you would've trusted my motives a little more too."

But how could I have understood him as well as he wanted? I know now that any person or institution that requires unquestioning obedience forfeits not only the right to be understood, but the possibility of it: understanding can happen only after questioning, comparison, exploration. Men in the Church, I was told often enough, were in authority over me; I should not try to be on an equal level with them. But exerting the authority of the priesthood seemed to render men not larger and stronger, but stunted and misshapen, unworthy to demand from me the mutual respect and understanding I felt ought to exist between me and other women, who were my equals. The good relationships I achieved with men occurred when they sought to minimize their authority, not when they sought to enlarge it as President Bertram had done that day. (emphasis added special, for this blog entry.)

I realize that the process of leaving the church differs for everyone who goes through it. But I confess that I have never understood a certain deference to or interest in the priesthood. It's not just what Jonathan points out in this comment, that the priesthood is largely administrative; it's that seems to hurt all but the strongest, most moral of men--same as political power. I don't know if there's something extra pernicious about the priesthood itself (I'm perfectly willing to believe that there is), or the sense of entitlement it so often involves.

This sense of entitlement plays out not only in the fact that men with positions of authority feel they have the right to tell others how to live, to chastise or excommunicate them when they misbehave, to ask about the details of sexual activity--you name any of the conventional ways priesthood leaders "exercise" that authority. It's also obvious in the ways that even men who see the limitations of the priesthood still focus on men's concerns, at the expense of women's, and privilege men's voices to the exclusion of women's. This is something I've written about repeatedly: Even at Sunstone, there are more straight men participating in panels on how to make life better and more just for gay members of the church (admittedly, a very important topic) than there are men on panels about how to improve the lives of women (which should also be an important topic). Furthermore, most of those panels ostensibly about the concerns of gay members of the church (though there's rarely a mention of lesbians) are filled entirely by men. Gay men often feel entitled to claim and retain the privileges of the priesthood at the expense of their wives' happiness and well-being. It's fucking INFURIATING.

I know, I know--most of these guys are NICE guys, and they can't be expected to understand certain things about others' experience, because (as a member of my family told me) empathy is just too difficult to strive for. (This was before political conservatives turned empathy into a liability.) That's a position I critique here.

I don't have priesthood envy, mostly because I don't think the priesthood is good for people. This is not to say that I don't want to see gender equality and parity--I do, not only in the church, but everywhere else. But I really doubt that extending to women the priesthood, at least in its current form, is going to help with that. I think it would be better to abolish the priesthood, or to reinvent it. I realize that's never going to happen, but I still think it would be a good thing.

The thing is, Jonathan is right that "Women in the church can heal others, perform ordinances and miracles" but what he doesn't acknowledge is that HUMAN BEINGS can do these things--in and out of the church. We don't need these old gits in Salt Lake City or Rome or wherever to give us permission to develop our potential as human beings.

So what I want to know is this: why, even after we realize that, do we defer to them? Why does it often take time and work, beyond merely leaving the rejecting the doctrines of the church (which theoretically should be enough, right?), for people to feel they are the equal of the person who, however blameless or generous or honorable his (and it's virtually always a HE) motives in wielding this coercive authority and acting on behalf of a repressive institution, is, nonetheless, wielding coercive authority and acting on behalf of a repressive institution?

That's the first question. And the second is, Does holding the priesthood make it harder or easier to question and/or reject the authority of the priesthood?

This is the first time I've stood toe-to-toe with a Mormon leader and felt like his complete equal in every way. It's liberating to not feel beholden to Church authority and priesthood power.

In her discussion of John's post, chanson responded to this statement by writing

This jumps out at me because it's so alien to my own experience. Have other former believers felt like John has here? The last time the church leaders held any power over me, it was at BYU, where they had power to do real things to me, like expel me and withhold my transcripts, not just woo-stuff like withholding the keys to the Celestial Kingdom, etc. And before that, church leaders had authority over me because they were grown-ups and I was a kid. To me, John's statement would be like me being surprised that high school teachers are now my peers, when once they were so intimidating.

in a comment, I stated that I was nonplussed by John's statement. First of all, John has the priesthood (at least currently, whether he chooses to exercise it or not); he is the equal of certain church leaders in ways that I as a woman never would have been in their eyes. (Note: after I had drafted this entry and was finding all the links for comments and so forth, John responded to that, stating, "even if I (supposedly) held the priesthood, a) I was never comfortable with it, and b) in the Church I was still placed firmly in hierarchical relationships with other men.")

In this entry I'm going to provide all of what I said in that comment on Main Street Plaza, plus a little extra stuff, mostly as background and because I want a record of it here, but really this is all preliminary stuff to get to a discussion about gender and the priesthood.

Anyway. I certainly felt that I was the equal if not the superior of a great many Mormon leaders throughout my life.

Afterward I complained to my favorite institute teacher, who had also been in the meeting, saying that these guys abused their power. He said, "I'd like to draw a distinction between authority and power. Those guys, they have authority. You have no authority. What you have is power. None of them has the personal power you have, which is why they got so upset when you disagreed with them. They could never stand up to authority; they can only wield it."

After my mission, before I finally left the church in my mid 20s, I went toe-to-toe with Mormon leaders all the time, who were often outraged by my refusal to shut up when they told me to. And rather by accident, I learned how deep their sense of entitlement and superiority was. Since I didn't respect some of these guys or their positions, it was rather natural to begin thinking of them as "Bob" or "Jim" instead of "President Smith" or "Bishop Jones." But when I slipped up and actually used their first names aloud, oh my god! It was like I'd assaulted them! How dare I! How dare I presume a level of equality! How dare I address them as they addressed me!

After that, except for a few really remarkable men who had treated me with respect and equality from the get-go, they were all just middle-aged dudes with first names and sweaty hands I'd prefer not to shake.

And even the good ones--well, if I was ever in a situation where they invoked their church authority and I wanted to show that it didn't much carry much weight with me, I would use their first names. Admittedly, THAT felt weird. One night, almost six or seven years after my mission, my first mission president tracked down my parents, got my phone number in Iowa where I was going to grad school, and called me, so he could ask me about entropy, a concept I had introduced him to once during an interview on my mission. It was nice to catch up with him, and of course by habit I called him "President Carlson" at first. But then at the end he said that he "was worried about my soul and wished I would come back to church" so I wouldn't go to hell (that last bit about hell was implied rather than stated explicitly). It was kindly meant--he really did care about me--so I responded to that kindness rather than the judgment and told him that I didn't worry about that, but I still ended the conversation by saying "Good night, Monte" rather than "Good night, President Carlson." This even though I continued to call him President Carlson in my mind (and in the occasional blog entry).

So I was really interested by this comment from John (which follows a really funny comment you have to read for its own sake) in which he says

I couldn't bring myself to address him as "President", so I called and introduced him as "Doctor." So I guess even if it took me three years to finally shake off my irrational fear of ecclesiastical authority, my inerudite lips still pay homage to the power of the institutionally bequeathed title

I would have called the guy by his first name. We both would have found it weird, but that's what I would have done. That's what I DID do in similar situations.

And as I thought about this, I began to wonder if it was the fact that I DIDN'T have the priesthood, and therefore DIDN'T have a certain respect for it, that has made me willing and able to call these guys by their first names. I wonder if men respect the authority of the priesthood more because they have it.

p.s. Please also read The Priesthood is Magic.

I understand that Season II of True Blood starts tonight. If I had HBO I would probably watch it. I'm about half way through Season I on dvd, and I like it well enough to keep going. Before starting the show, I read Dead Until Dark, the first novel in Charlaine Harris's series about southern vampires, also known as the Sookie Stackhouse books.

I admit I paid attention to True Blood only because I felt obligated to do so, given that I write about Buffy and that I'm going to write about the loathsome Twilight series. But it's... interesting. I'm interested. Dead Until Dark was about 50 million times better than Twilight, on every level: better prose, stronger character development, more realistic attraction between the main characters, and WAY more compelling supporting characters. (Though one of the nice things the TV show has done is make those supporting characters even more compelling--I didn't realize how much the story needed more from Tara and Lafayette until I saw more of them.)

True Blood isn't as good as Buffy, at least not so far, but it sure as hell doesn't suck. (Well, OK, it sucks in the vampire way. It doesn't suck in the bad way, of, you know, sucking something besides blood from a jugular vein.) But despite the fact that both shows focus on pretty young blonde human females with supernatural abilities who fall in love with vampires over a century old, they're so different that they're hard to compare.

I started to provide some background and analysis of TB, but also started worrying about spoilers, since I know I have quite a few readers in Europe where the show has yet to air, and besides, if you really want to know about the show, there are websites that already contain more information can I could provide. So I'm just going to make a few non-spoiler observations.

2. One of the things I really like about the Sookie Stackhouse books is that the heroine is named Sookie Stackhouse, an interesting, unusual name with some nice hard consonants to balance out the girly sibilants. You realize what a good name it is for an attractive young modern girl who falls in love with an ancient vampire when you compare it to the names of the others of her ilk: Buffy Summers, Bella Swann, Elena Gilbert. (I only learned about this Elena Gilbert person today when I went to tv.com and was confronted by an ad for the Vampire Diaries.)

I admit that when I first started watching True Blood, I confused Sookie Stackhouse with Sookie Sapperstein, the character played by Claire Danes in Igby Goes Down (which I like a lot). Not only are they both blonde 20-somethings, but the WASPs Sookie Sapperstein sleeps with seem pretty vampiric, so the women's sexual proclivities are fairly similar too. Anyway. That's actually an aside.

Ooh.... it just occurs to me that the word "sookie" is as close as you can get to naming someone "suckie," and might be a bad vampire pun.... Oh god, I hope that wasn't intentional. I hope C Harris had something else in mind when she came up with that name.

The name Buffy Summers was intended to be a joke, of course: Joss Whedon thought it was funny that someone supernaturally empowered to kill monsters should have a name as silly as Buffy. there is nothing ironic (or even very thoughtful) about the name Bella Swann: that character is not an ugly duckling; she's a beautiful swan--get it? It's interesting how much the names Buffy and Bella share: B/vowel/double-consonant/vowel(sound); Swann and Summers are pretty similar too.

I don't know much about this Elena Gilbert character; apparently she's a blonde in the novels but they cast a brunette for the tv show. Her first name is very girly and vowely; her last name is thoroughly respectable and at least begins with a nice voiced velar plosive. (That brief introduction to phonetics I had 25 years ago has finally paid off.)

But here's the thing: While Sookie (Suckie?) Stackhouse is a good name for a chick in love with a vampire, we've seen other blondes with supernatural abilities, an unconventional love life and lots of S's (i.e., Samantha Stevens). I'd really like to see a vamp-loving chick named, I don't know, Rhoda Morgenstern, maybe, or Victoria Barkley, or even Willow Rosenberg or Rudy Huxtable. Something with a little more edge and a little less hisss.

I was sitting here imagining really terrible TV names I hope don't come back. Shirley Partridge heads the list... That made me think of Carol Brady, and that made me think of Carrie Bradshaw.... those last two names are almost the same name. OK, I know Candace Bushnell chose "Carrie Bradshaw" because it had the same initials she did, but couldn't she have picked something a little less like one of tv's blandest moms?

I am glad I finally got around to correcting that oversight. I highly recommend this essay if, for some reason, you missed it like me. My only complaint with it is that it makes no mention of the ways torture is enabled by the temple ceremony.

Now, Sunstone has a strict policy of not discussing the details of the temple, which isn't all that remarkable, since when you go through the temple, you make a vow never to discuss it. There was, however, an article in the most recent issue about how Mormons might make the temple seem less weird and more respectable to people who will never understand what's going on in there. The article is seriously whacked. It enraged me as few things have lately, and I seriously considered both A) posting an angry rant about it and B) writing a letter to the editor of Sunstone about all the failings in the article, but then I decided I had better things to do than explain to the pompous Mormon man who wrote that delusional piece of shit just how clueless he is about the reasons why people REALLY dislike the temple.

But then John R posted something on his blog about how he's probably going to be exed for a previous blog entry about the gruesome death threats made in the temple.

In a comment, John illustrated how he felt about the vow of silence he made in the temple with this analogy:

Well. This caused A LOT of consternation among believing Mormons. How dare John compare the temple to any sort of abuse?

So I wrote this (which I am cleaning up here a little, because a bout of PTSD hindered my proofreading):

I think John's analogy is very apt, deficient only in the level of violence, threat and divine retribution involved. If the adult also did something like, say, drown a puppy in a bathtub and inform the minor that any discussion of the details of the relationship would make God so angry that he would want the minor to die, both in this life and next, then it would mirror more closely what actually went on in the temple.

(and, incidentally, I am able to offer that insight because I read a book where something similar happens: Riptide by Marion Smith. It has its problems as literature, but as a discussion of abuse and coercion in Mormonism, it's pretty damn great.)

And this is where I circle back to what I opened this blog entry with:

I realize that the temple ceremony was changed in 1990, but I went through at a time when you still had to enact your own ritual execution through several possible methods and were told, explicitly, that you deserved to be brutally murdered if you talked about this stuff.

Most of the time I think that I've gotten over most of the harm done to me by the church. But I am shaking and fighting the urge to vomit as I type this. The threat of violence, the coercive, punitive tone, made the temple a form of spiritual rape.

Just as we are seeing with the whole torture debate, information and promises extracted through violence or threat of violence are legally invalid. Therefore I do not feel that my vow is at all binding. Furthermore, not only do I feel no obligation to abide by it, I feel an obligation to inform others of what I experienced.

Much is made of the fact that it was an LDS judge who authorized and two LDS psychologists who created the Bush administration's torture program. Given that these men were trained to believe that coercion and threats of violence were actually part of the pinnacle of spirituality and communion with God, is that really surprising?

To anyone who objects to the characterization of the temple as coercive or abuse, I must point that the death threats and penalties were DESIGNED to be scary and intimidating, and to compel silence. A desire to scare and intimidate is why the penalty for betraying the vow is death, as opposed, to, say having to drink lemonade and eat cookies for dinner on alternate Tuesdays.

And yet, feeling scared and intimidated and coerced by scary, intimidating, coercive statements and ceremonies is seen, in the Mormon church, as evidence of a disordered psyche and resistance to divine truth.

No wonder our society is so violent. It's how we think our god expresses love to his children: he threatens to kill us. And if we find anything wrong with that, well, we deserve to die.

But the training to save things for special was not limited to clothes. Other things were way too special to use every day. You didn't use the good silver to eat spaghetti on Tuesday, for instance--solid sterling was just for Sunday. The china, however, wasn't even just for Sunday--it was just for company or holidays.

Saving-for-special should even extended to perishable items, I was taught. Really expensive European cocoa, for instance, had to be saved, for years if necessary, until an appropriate occasion to cook with it came along. No matter that after so many years at the back of the cupboard being special it had passed from specialness to inferiority of flavor and texture; at least it hadn't been wasted and diluted through consumption on some frivolous occasion.

Instead, because they were Mormon and didn't drink, they laid away and kept for years vast supplies of regular old comestibles. There may be foodstuffs out there besides booze that improve with a decade or two of age, but none spring to mind right now. I can certainly appreciate well-aged cheese, but a five-year-old gouda is considered pretty damn old. Some things will keep indefinitely, if properly stored--unground wheat, for instance, can keep for centuries--and those "best by" dates on cans and so forth might not require strict observance, but eventually things will go bad, and there's no use pretending otherwise. I can tell you from firsthand experience, for instance, that a can of Vienna sausages left for twelve years in a pantry because no one wants to eat them will, eventually, start to corrode and smell really, really bad.

Anyway. The point is, I recognize both the virtues and limitations of this "saving things for special" business. My nice things stay nice, because I take care of them. But sometimes my nice things, although still nice, become unusable, at least in the case of clothes, because I save them until they're out of style or no longer fit me properly.

And while I'm much better than my parents about consuming luxury food before it spoils, I'm still not perfect.

For instance, in November 2005, when Matt and I were in Paris, we came across this French Christmas tea set in a cute little kitchen-stuff shop. There was a small canister of The de Noel (aka "Christmas Tea")

and an itty bitty jar of totally yummy jelly made from said Christmas tea, and one of those stacking teapot/teacup thingies.

Now, I consumed the jelly right away, because the jar really was TINY--a few pieces of toast was all it took to polish it off. But the tea itself--well, I like tea, but I prefer coffee, so I don't drink that much tea to begin with. And I really like the canister and like setting it on a shelf in my kitchen where I can actually look at it, and so, somehow, partly because I've been saving it for special and partly just because, I still haven't used it up, even though I've had it for coming up on four years now.

So I just brewed a cup. It has probably lost some flavor and intensity, but it still tastes pretty damn good. And by saving it this long, I now get to feel both luxurious AND virtuous when I drink it, and that's kind of cool.

I choke up over D-Day. I am vehemently opposed to wars of aggression like the US's nasty war in Iraq, but the heroic assault by the Allied Forces on the shores of Nazi-occupied France--that gets me where I live. I honor and admire the sacrifice that happened on those beaches in Normandy 65 years ago today. Particularly since it was barely the beginning of the end: eleven months would pass before Germany's unconditional surrender and V-E Day proclaimed on May 8, 1945.

I always observe D-Day, which isn't to say that I celebrate it; I just, well, watch it. I watch its approach on the calendar; I watch its hours pass; I watch night fall and I note that fact that when I wake up the next day, D-Day is over, even though the invasion of those beaches in Normandy would not be completed, in some cases, for days.

The US Army has a website commemorating D-Day, and of course there are books and movies devoted to D-Day as well. I think I might watch The Longest Day this afternoon.

Here it is:

Put the cabbage in a bowl. Add enough Miracle Whip to coat the cabbage, and enough sweet pickle juice to dilute the Miracle Whip. Tastes best if you make it a few hours ahead of time, then chill so that it's good and cold and the flavors blend.

Now, I do want to say that in general I don't like Miracle Whip--it's gross. I'm not sure it's actually food. I don't actually much like commercial mayonnaise, either, truth by told, but it seems more food-like than Miracle Whip. But Miracle Whip is the only thing that really tastes right in this recipe.

The sweet pickle juice is the most important ingredient, however. It provides a perfect amount of sweetness and tartness and it's just really, really good.

The one deviation I allow myself is that I put a little pepper in the dish. Mom didn't, because not everyone liked pepper, and you can always pepper it yourself at the table.

Take this to a Fourth of July picnic--I predict people will tell you how good it is.

It's a good thing the essay didn't begin with the second sentence I offer above, because that sentence sucks. But if I had submitted that particularly essay to a mainstream secular journal whose readers weren't necessarily familiar with Mormonism, I would have felt obligated to provide lots of background and context--maybe not in the first sentence, but certainly SOMEWHERE in the essay. Whereas I knew that as soon as a Mormon audience was informed that I had a companion named Sister Knight, readers would assume, correctly, that I was a woman somewhere in my 20s who had elected to serve a mission.

Despite or perhaps because of their self-proclaimed and cherished status as a peculiar people, Mormons hate to be misunderstood. As a result, when they talk about their religion, they explain A LOT. Sometimes--perhaps usually--they explain TO EXCESS.

Two groups especially prone to excessive explanations are missionaries and Mormon writers.

Mormon writers who take Mormonism as their subject matter indulge in excessive explanation because they want readers to understand not only Mormonism, but what Mormonism means to the people they're writing about. They believe--with some validity--that readers won't understand their work if they don't understand certain things about Mormonism. But I have come to believe that while some explanation is order, Mormon writers should strive always for the barest, skinniest minimum.

And then there is a third group of excessive explainers: Mormon writers who write about missions. They over explain more than anyone else I have encountered. They 'splain, and then they 'splain, and then they 'SPLAIN SOME MORE, JUST FOR FUN. Except by that point, it has stopped being fun--for the reader, at least.

Several years ago another Mormon writer and I thought it would be cool to put together an anthology of personal essays about missions. We put out a call for submissions and got LOADS of essays in response. A few were phenomenonally good; several were pretty great; most were mediocre; a few more were egregiously bad. But with very few exceptions, all of them contained too much exposition, too many foreign words or terms unique to Mormonism followed by parenthetical translations or glosses, and little wikipedia entries about Mormon doctrine, practice or culture.

It was PAINFUL to read essay after essay with the same problem. It was also very educational, because I suddenly realized how annoying it was when I did precisely those things in my own work.

I thought that including Chinese terms throughout my text gave it color, flavor. It might--but it's also precious and pretentious unless a term is actually relevant to the narrative or argument. In order to keep my eyes from glazing over, I started skipping over all foreign terms in the essays I read, whether they were Spanish, French, Chinese, Korean. And when I finished, I went through my own work and started getting rid of any foreign terms, unless I felt they were absolutely necessary to the intrinsic meaning of the text. I would never again throw one in just for "flavor."

And the mini wikipedia entries, the three paragraphs complete with footnotes--about baptism for the dead, or the MTC, how you fill out your papers before going on a mission, what happens when you get your call.... I mean, yes, it all really MATTERS--to us. It really, really, really MATTERS. A LOT. I want the people who read my work to understood, fully, why a call is called a call. But maybe they can sorta get it on their own. Maybe even though I care, they don't. Maybe if they have to wade through my explanation of what happens when someone, anyone gets a call, they'll lose interest in the still more important details of what happened when I got my call.

Certainly that happened with the essays I read: I became impatient with long passages about baptism in general and so didn't care as much when I got to the account of an individual baptism. It's true that I already knew all about the stuff being explained, which might have made me more impatient. But it's also true that I had an investment in the subject matter and a reason to continue reading that many readers don't. I really want to know how other people talk about their missions. I would LOVE an anthology full of thoughtful, interesting essays about the good, the bad, the ugly, the miraculous, the tedious, the heartbreak, of a mission. So if I gave up on work that tried to provide that, well, it means something.

My co-editor and I didn't abandon the project in that we both still think, theoretically, that it's a great idea for an anthology. But we just didn't get enough truly strong work to fill it. We could have devoted huge chunks of our life into reshaping the mediocre essays into pretty good ones, and at one point we actually intended to, but it didn't happen.

Shortly before Christmas I read a really great blog entry by Stephen Carter, the editor of Sunstone, at the Red Brick Store, about the myth of the writer genius (later revised into a piece about the author bunny). Stephen claimed that he learned all sorts of important things about story craft from reading one single book on screenwriting, a claim that intrigued me, so I put the title on my amazon.com wishlist, and someone bought it for me for Christmas.

And then it sat on my shelf, for almost six months. Last weekend I read it. And I'm here to agree with Stephen: Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee is a freaking great book, one I wish I had read not just when the postman dropped it off in January, but years ago. It's very wise, and I will reread it before very long, I think. A bit of advice that particular resonated with me is this:

Never include anything the audience can reasonably and easily assume has happened. Never pass on exposition unless the missing fact would cause confusion. You do not keep the audience's interest by giving it information, but by withholding information, except that which is absolutely necessary for comprehension.... Reveal only that exposition the audience absolutely needs and wants to know and no more. (335-337, emphasis in original)

That is one thing we'll have to achieve in order for Mormon literature to grow up: we'll have to stop EXPLAINING and EXPOSING and DEFINING to excess. Yes, we'll have to do some a little explaining, a tiny bit of exposing, and of course we have to acknowledge how weird it is that "elder" means someone who is very, very young instead of really old. But I sincerely hope that eventually I will stop reading works that go "story, definition, story, wikipedia entry, story, wikipedia entry, different wikipedia entry, story."

I especially hope I'll stop writing work like that. It won't be easy. But I'm determined to try.

2 & 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp ground ginger
3/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cloves
3/4 cups butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup molasses
1/4 cup sugar for rolling

Combine dry ingredients; set aside. Cream butter and sugar well; add egg and molasses. Stir in dry ingredients and mix thoroughly. You can chill the dough for a couple of hours if you want. Otherwise, shape into 1&1/2 inch balls and roll in sugar. Place on ungreased cookie sheet about 2&1/2 inches apart. Bake at 350F for ten minutes (twelve if you chilled the dough) or until light brown and still puffy. Do not overcook. Let stand for two minutes before transferring to a wire rack. They're especially good with milk.

Liberty Park is many people's favorite park, but it's not mine. I much prefer Memory Grove, home to all sorts of memorials--mostly to veterans of various wars, though my favorite is a memorial a guy put up to his wife. (If you do work on memory or memorializations, you've got to check out this place.) It's mere blocks from downtown, and right at the mouth of City Creek Canyon, so you can be out of the city in just a 40-minute walk. Plus it's not called City Creek for nothing-there's really a creek.

But even Memory Grove is not my favorite park--at least, not right now.

Personally I don't think that's the best name for that park, even though it lies on part of Brigham Young's old farm, because there's another park a couple hundred yards away that is more Brigham Young-y in that it contains the graves of BY and several of his wives. The graves are clearly the reason that park exists--someone elected (wisely, I think) not to move the graves--but they're not the focus. There is some mediocre, banal, didactic statuary of the sort you typically see on church property, including a statue of BY sitting on a bench reading a book to two small children. There are also two big bronze plaques, one bearing the lyrics of "Oh My Father" by Eliza R Snow (who is buried in the park not far from Brigham) and the other bearing the lyrics to "Come, Come Ye Saints," which always makes me tear up 'cause it's actually a really great song that expresses so much pathos, hope and loss.

There is no statue of BY in the BY Historical Park. There are two statues of women working in a garden (actually, one woman both gardening and minding a small boy, plus one girl who has worked so hard she needs a drink of water), two statues of guys working in a quarry, and two statues of boys playing in a pond--only boys get to have fun in this park. There's a water wheel. There's a big plot of grass and a bunch of signs asking you to stay on the sidewalk.

And there are half a dozen benches on the south side of the park surrounded by lilac bushes, and as I've mentioned before, I LOVE lilacs. These lilac bushes make this spot completely magical. You can sit on one of those benches and have lilacs above, behind and to the side of you. They offer shade from the sun and every so often a breeze comes along, carrying the scent of the blooms. The plants and shrubs on the north side of the park are high enough that you can't see the traffic just beyond it, though you can see the doom of the Capitol Building above the foliage. (You can hear the traffic, but hey, it's a park in the middle of downtown, not a cloud cuckoo land.) It is the single best place I've ever found in my life to read a book. It's also a really good place to drink coffee and feel content. And despite that, it's always relatively empty. I'm usually the only person there.

Lilacs don't last forever; some of the blossoms are already beginning to brown. But one of the reasons I like that park so much is that it honors, accommodates and plans for a transitory pleasure. I think that's really cool, and I think it offers some important lessons about pleasure: it needs to be both cultivated and savored, because while you can make it happen, you can't make it stay.

Here are the lilac blossoms that hang right above my head when I take my position on the third bench.

Here are a couple of the statues and the benches and so forth.

See? It's a nice place.

OK, it also has a bunch of homophobic Mormons and the headquarters of the Mormon church, but all of that is remarkably easy to ignore, because as I said, the city itself is really liberal, and that affects life in the city itself (I'm NOT talking about the rest of the state) more than the Mormon church does. And some Mormons here do really great things for the city, the state, and perhaps even the world.

While I'm sorry that Utah will lose a prudent, effective, likable governor, I'm thrilled with this appointment. I think that the ambassadorship to China is one of the more important diplomatic positions within the US government, and I think Huntsman is an ideal candidate to fill it.

Like me, Huntsman became fluent in Mandarin when he served a mission for the Mormon church in Taiwan; unlike me, he appears to have maintained his fluency. But aside from the language issue, I think a mission in Taiwan was probably really good training for understanding a lot of issues in China. I mean, if you want to be a xenophobic jerk who learns nothing at all about the culture you're living in, you can manage that as a missionary, but if you want to understand what motivates people and what they care about, you can manage that too, fairly easily. Actually, I take that first part back. You couldn't even get in the door of someone's house or buy groceries if you didn't understand something about Chinese attitudes toward courtesy and indirectness.

There's also the fact that at the time Huntsman served a mission, diplomatic relations between Taiwan and the Mainland were nonexistent--people couldn't even send mail between the two places. Even when I was there, missionaries were often enlisted to help people in Taiwan correspond with family or friends on the Mainland: missionaries would mail letters from people in Taiwan to the missionaries' families in the US, who would then use US postage and a US return address to send the letter to Peoples' Republic of China. That was a huge lesson in international relations right there.

Plus Huntsman is a billionaire, which I have a feeling the government of China will totally respect.

And unlike Mitt Romney, another Mormon governor/rich businessman with lots of hair, he's not a douche nozzle, which I think will help things too.

The title of this blog entry, by the way, is the Romanization for a question easily translated as "do you understand?" "Dong" doesn't rhyme with "long," you should know; the vowel is the same as in "don't." The question is composed with a standard way of constructing a question in Chinese: you offer someone a set of options and they pick the accurate one--about like, "Do you get it or not?" Even when posing a question that could be answered with "Yes" if the question were posed in English--say, "You understand this, right?"--the answer would not be "Yes" but "I understand" (or even just plain "understand") because Chinese doesn't have a word that corresponds exactly to "yes." All of which is important in effective communication in Chinese, and all of which Huntsman already dongs.