The love of a child

When I was 15, I wrote an essay called "The Desire to Bear"...

In that essay, I analyzed what I thought were the reasons why I felt like I had a strong desire to be a father so early in life. Later in life, in a church talk (I think it was on mothers), I talked about a memory I had when I had just starting understanding how life works--how people are born, grow up, and have babies of their own. I understood that each baby had a mommy and a daddy. Girls grew up to be mommies and boys grew up to be daddies. Since I was a boy, I would grow up to be a daddy. This line of thought made sense. But there was a problem. Being an honest, innocent child, I had no problem in admitting that I "loved" my mommy more than my daddy. This caused great alarm to my simple mind, as I came to understand that my children would never love me as much as they would their mommy.

I have since grown up, done many things, married, and now have two children. I now understand that my understanding of "love" as a child more similarly resembled "like". At least, that is my hope. A common occurence in our home is wanting to go from daddy to mommy, referring to mommy as the boss, or not believing something that daddy says until mommy confirms it.

However, I had a bit of a treat today, as Kiya, our 8-month old, seemed to have occassional fits of wanting her daddy. It was rather strange, but very welcomed. There is something about a baby clinging to you. I soak up such moments, fully realizing that someday I may be lucky to get her even to want to talk to me.

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Salsa Night has moved to the new version of Blogger

Which I believe means that you need a google account to continue to post. When I made the switch, I didn't know that everyone would have to individually switch to the new blogger (which uses your gmail account). If you don't have a gmail account, Jenny or I could send you an invite.

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Differences

Have you ever suddenly realized how very very different you are from someone you love? I had that realization this last Sunday, during Sacrament Meeting.

I love my husband very very much. We have a lot in common: we met in the Electrical & Computer Engineering department at BYU, we graduated from high school in '97, we love cheese, we both entered high school math competitions, we took math for fun, we like Fourier analysis...

But on Sunday we spoke in sacrament meeting. We spoke together once before, during our first year of marriage - that was only a 7 minute talk because our ward had 4 speakers and a choir number. This week it was us - all us - no youth speaker (there are only about 8 youth in our ward, so they don't make them speak every other month).

We had been asked to talk about the Old Testament since we've been reading it together in our family scripture study at home. I travelled to Philadelphia for work last week, so I had had some time to think about my talk. When I came home, I spent several hours choosing scriptures, quotes and stories. Saturday night, after a full day's work and a ward Christmas party, I sat down and basically wrote out my talk. I know it's better to speak from outlines, but when I do that, the sentences don't make sense. Brain disconnect somewhere. I read my talk to Dan, and he timed me to let me know how I was doing. I asked him how he was doing, and he said he had some scriptures looked up.

Some scriptures looked up! Gee whiz! I was now more stressed for Dan than for myself. After all, he's not really interested in going to ward functions, dinner at a friend's house, or even chatting after church for a couple minutes. And he has to talk for 20 minutes and has only a few scriptures! I mean, I know he served a mission and had to talk all the time, but seriously, I was worried.

Or should I say I was foolishly worried. I gave my talk, made connections between the Old Testament & food storage, shared my favorite OT scripture (Psalm 100, especially verse 1), bore my testimony, and sat down. I felt momentarily relieved, but as I listened to the choir my nerves came up again.

Then Dan took the stage. Really. He was so awesome. I am so proud. He started off with a joke, and then launched into what worth he has found in the Old Testament, with tons of scripture comparisons and personal insight. I mean, he admitted he thought Psalms were basically hymns until he realized that it was the 2nd most quoted book of the OT (Isaiah being first) in the New Testament. At least, I think that's the right fact. He also showed how many of the "kinder" commandments were also in the OT - like loving thy neighbor as thyself - you know, the 2nd greatest commandment? He is really interested in how the Old Testament shows up in later scripture, and his enthusiasm was in the talk. After 20 minutes he had to stop - his time was up, but not his information.

After sacrament meeting, tons of people came up and I got the "great job" and Dan got the "really impressed - fascinating - I never knew that - I loved it" remarks. I couldn't be prouder. Hopefully the bishopric will remember that next time and maybe even not ask me to talk. :)

And I can't help but laugh at how different we are - I read stories, which is good, but Dan really tries to see the scriptures in relation to each other. At least I have eternity to learn.

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The doctor is in. 5 cents please.

Katie and I watched the Charlie Brown Christmas Special a few nights ago and I realized that Charlie Brown reminds me of me.


At the beginning of the show, Charlie Brown is kind of lamenting the fact that he doesn’t feel the “Christmas Spirit”. He doesn’t receive Christmas cards, his dog has “gone commercial” by participating in a Christmas lights decorating contest for money, his sister wants Santa to bring her cash, and he, as always, doesn’t feel like he has any friends in general. In fact, he laments the fact that this time of year where everyone is happy emphasizes his unhappiness. In other words, he feels like Christmas is mocking him.
I often feel similarly about Christmas. I have many complaints about Christmastime in America. I will briefly explain each one in turn, hopefully I can keep myself from ranting too much.

1. “Christmas Songs” about snow and winter (rather than Christmas).
2. Commercialism, for lack of a better word. I saw a Wal-Mart advertisement last year that showed an obviously wealthy family opening up laptops and other expensive electronic luxuries on Christmas morning with soft Christmas music playing in the background. They were trying to associate luxuries with family time and Christmas. It made me ill.
3. The idea that Christmastime is a special time of year where we pay attention to people in need. The part of this that is never said but often implied, perhaps unintentionally, is that we don’t care about anyone else come January. Also, the idea that Christmas time is a special time where we contemplate the importance and divinity of Christ’s birth.
4. The tendency for the value of tradition to trump the value of anything else (logic, civility, etc.). Many years in my family there was an argument about whether we were supposed to get dressed out of our pajamas before we opened presents or not. Those on both sides of the argument would often cite tradition (“That’s how we always do it.”) as if that settled it.

I guess that list will do for now. In short, the way that most other people celebrate Christmas bothers me. This is nothing new – at least some of the above are things that have bothered me for many years.
Two years ago, when we were living in Colorado, I mentioned my Charlie Brownish problem with the Christmas season to my Home Teacher, who was a middle aged man with sons older that I am. He listened and then told me that it shouldn’t keep me from really celebrating Christmas. He suggested that I should actively celebrate the Christmas season in the way I think it ought to be celebrated and let that suffice.
After he left, I realized how very right he was. I could complain all day long about the actions of other people during this or any other time of year and it wouldn’t do anybody any good, least of all me. Since then I have been trying, with at least slightly noticeable success, to be more cheery and try to celebrate Christmas in such a way as to not offend myself.

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Free Advice? Sign Me Up

Once again, Julie C has inspired me to post. I have a question that I really need help with. Bad. Now. Lotsa help. Pleeeaase ...

Here's the problem: I need a way to control my iMac from Nick's laptop while we're up in Seattle over Christmas break. By control I mean access files, programs, run the programs and save new files, and ... I think that's all. Is this possible? (I know it can be done, but can I figure it out is the real question. The answer to which is no. Hence this post.)

What I've found:
A program called Timbuktu that has good reviews, does what I want, and costs $200.00 (I'd need it for 2 computers and it's about $95 per computer.) Pros: established program, people like it. Cons: $$$

Two other VNC programs: one called RealVNC and the other called Chicken of the VNC (for macs). The first claims to be cross-platform, but all their examples deal only with Linux/Unix/Windows. They have a mac version of the program however. The second is a VNC written specifically for macs. Pros: neither look expensive (I think they're free) Cons: Does this actually do what I want? Is it trustworthy?

One other item: we have internet through comcast so our IP address changes all the time. I'm not sure if this would be a problem (or how to overcome it) with the VNC clients. Timbuktu lets you assign an email address to your "home" computer and then you access the computer through that instead of the IP address.

If any of you have any (any any any) insights, tips, ideas, help, advice, etc. it would be most appreciated :)

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Advice? Help?

I guess every family has high tension at the holiday when everyone gets together, right?

I was just wondering at what point do you just listen to one family member say bad things about another family member and how do you tell them that you're not comfortable with that? I was caught a little by surprise by that this past weekend, and I'm not sure if there's anything I can do now. I probably should have told them at the time that I didn't want to hear it - instead I tried to defend the accused person, but that didn't really work. Anything I said was rejected because it didn't agree with their opinion. Any ideas? Should I do anything about it now, or should I just wait and figure out what to do if (when) it happens again?

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A Grave for Two

My grandpa was an odd man. A good man, but odd. Soon, it will be a year since he died. I always thought of my grandpa Webb as the "good grandpa", partly because his only competition for the best grandpa title was my other grandpa, who was quite mean and bitter, but mostly because he always gave me rib cage crushing hugs when I was a kid. As my favorite grandpa, I would eagerly look forward to when he and my grandma would make the trek from Sandy to visit us in Seattle, always bringing a few boxes of grandma's homemade chocolates- if you think See's or Godiva's are good chocolates, then I pity you since you never got to taste hers.

My grandma died when I was around ten, and after she was gone my grandpa started his long slide into extreme old age- he finally died at age 95 this year. Whenever I saw him he seemed less interested in what was going on around him, and his mind seemed to be slipping a little. For example, at one of his birthday parties Jenny and I were talking to him when it came out that we both served our missions in South America. He then started to talk to us in Spanish- not great Spanish, but it was passable. This surprised me since I knew he did not serve a mission (he was of mission age during the great depression), and knew he had not lived overseas. He then told us about sailing on a great ocean liner to Mexico, and then on to Spain, where he stayed for a few years while he was young. I wondered why his biography (actually, my great-grandpa's biography, but he had his own chapter in it) had not mentioned it. Later, I talked to one of my 9 uncles about it and he laughed, saying that was his dementia kicking in and that he was only remembering some of his grandkids' experiences on their missions as if they were his own. That answer satisfied me, but I still wondered where he learned his Spanish.

My grandpa was of that generation that did not need a good education to get a good job, that stayed in one job for their whole lives, and that had a lot of kids. He had nine boys and three girls, all living in a small home in Sandy that I pass everyday on trax while going to school. It was also a time in the church when a lot of weird "folk" doctrines floated around, especially in the areas of the church where the members didn't have lots of education, which at that time were most. The ten tribes lived at the north pole, or even underground, Cain was wandering the Earth as a sasquatch, and patriarchs would often promise the recipients of their blessings amazing and often unbelievable things.

My grandpa's patriarchal blessing was no exception. In it, he was promised that he would live to see the second coming. No joke. The older he got, the more we all talked about it- how we all needed to repent soon because grandpa was getting older and older which meant that the second coming was near. When he hit 90, we knew the angelic trumpets could only be a few years away at most, though once he started approaching 95 and world conditions weren't lining up quite right I suspected the Patriarch might have been a little overzealous. And I was right- he died last February after 9 and a half well lived decades, and no one I know has been raptured yet. On the day of his funeral, the sun was out and there was a hint of spring on the air. At the Sandy city cemetary there must have been hundreds of people, and I was sure only family and close friends had been invited. There we stood next to his grave which was right next to another freshly dug piece of earth. I didn't think anything of it until the luncheon afterwards. I was sitting with my aunt who had taken care of him the last 20 years of his life and she was handing all the siblings a bill for the funeral. On one line was a fee for the removing of my grandma's coffin to be placed next to my grandpa. That was odd, I thought.

"Why did she need to be moved? Why couldn't grandpa be buried next to her?" I asked my aunt.

"He only bought one plot when she died."

"Didn't he think ahead to his own eventual demise?" I questioned further.

"Oh, well he always believed he would never die, so when grandma died he only bought the one plot, and by the time he died all the space around her had been taken."

Which brings me back to the goodness and the oddness of my grandpa. What faith he must have had to let his belief influence his actions to the extant that he didn't think it necessary to purchase a grave. If only more of us could have belief that strong. And yet, how odd... .

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"Someone is way cooler than us"

That's what Julie C said to me in an email that contained this link. I know she alluded to this under her recent comment, but I really think this deserves our attention. So I'm posting it right up front.

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M&Ms

So I was eating some m&ms today and I started thinking about the two associations I have with them. The first is when I was kid when my family would visit our cousins in Utah, my parents would stay up with our aunt and uncle, talking and eating a big bowl of m&ms, pausing only to send any m&m begging kids back to bed. The second is witnessing Jared's crusade to stick it to the man by never eating a blue m&m, and actually SAVE every blue m&m from any package he ever opened and from every package that the people around him who didn't think he was crazy ever opened, and send them back to the mars company that made them as an act of defiance against..... something. I forgot. My only question is, Jared- Did you ever send them?

As I sat down to write this, I realized I didn't know which company made m&ms. So I wikied it (is it a word, to "wiki" something?), and discovered that, yes, they were made by the Mars company. What I didn't know was that they are named after Forrest Mars (of Mars company fame) and Bruce Murrie, taking the first letter of their last names. They originally were a British product marketed as smarties, but when the two men sold them in the US, they had to change the name as Smarties were already being sold.

-Other m&m trivia I discovered: Peanut m&ms were called "treets" in Europe until 1990.
-M&ms were given to soldiers during World War II since they could survive a variety of climates.
-They were originally eaten by soldiers in the Spanish civil war, after which they were bought by the two aforementioned Americans.
-Steven Spielberg approached Mars about placing m&ms in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. They declined, and the offer went instead to the Hersheys Company to place Reeses Pieces. Their sales tripled the week after the release.
-The white "m" printed on each one started in 1950 and was originally black
-The original color for all m&ms was brown. In 1960 they added red, yellow and green. In 1976 they removed red due to cancer scares from red dye and replaced it with orange. After the scare died down, red was re-introduced in 1987. And we finally come to Jared's reason for his compaign:

In 1993, Mars ran a promotion in which consumers were invited to vote on which of blue, pink, or purple would be introduced. Blue was the winner, and with the removal of tan, it was added in early 1995.

So there you have it, the history of m&ms. Though I'm still interested in knowing how the anti blue campaign went.

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Lit Stuff

I'm not sure why I'm in such a posty mood the last week or so ... probably because I've been swamped with work and am trying to procrastinate as much as possible. Following that line of thought, remember that stuff I studied for many years at BYU? Literature? Yeah. That's the stuff. Turns out my mom wanted to cash in on her investment in my education.

She was out visiting an elderly member of my home ward the other day and he quoted her one of his favorite poems by Emily Dickinson (#766):

My Faith is larger than the Hills -
So when the Hills decay -
My Faith must take the Purple Wheel
To show the Sun the way -
'Tis first He steps upon the Vane -
And then - upon the Hill -
And then abroad the World He go
To do His Golden Will -

And if His Yellow feet should miss -
The Day would not arise -
The Flowers would slumber on their Stems -
No Bells have Paradise -

How dare I, therefore, stint a faith
On which so vast depends -
Lest Firmament should fail for me -
The Rivet in the Bands

Then he asked my mom what she thought the Purple Wheel was. She didn't know. But then she remembered her daughter, the one who spent eight years studying literature ... and she promised him she would find out.

I did a bit of searching around and this is what I came up with (from an email I sent her):

"Dickinson is known for her focus on light and physical imagery, so the Purple Wheel could be an image of the pre-dawn clouds/sky through which her faith must guide/bring the sun.

Purple's associations with royalty create an echo of the mythical image of Apollo's chariot, which brings the sun through the sky—again, the idea is that her faith must bring the dawn to the darkened sky.

While our modern association with wheel and movent tends toward the image of a steering wheel (taking control of something and steering/guiding it), for Dickinson's time period a more appropriate image would be that of a cart/wagon wheel—think of "Put your shoulder to the wheel"—the wheel needs to be guided or pushed by hand/body. In
other words, the image isn't so much about taking control as it is about becoming invested, body and soul, in the work. It's a movement that requires effort.

All of these things combine into an overall interpretation of the first four lines. Something along the lines of "I have great/large faith, and when the earth crumbles (things go wrong and the world appears dark and full of destruction) I have to take that faith and use it in order to bring back light and order into the world. This is hard work; it does not come easily. But I am the one responsible for guiding that light back into my world."

The rest of the poem can be read as describing Jesus going forth into all the world, the realization that all life, here and afterwards, depends on him, and the realization that she must continue to nurture her faith (she cannot cut it off—basically saying that she doesn't feel like she can say what God can and cannot do—she has to assume everything is possible) and realize how many things (all things) depend on God.

So the poem as a whole describes a possible loss of faith or at least a significant trial (the hills decay), a realization that she needs to work to bring back faith, the act of meditating on God and realizing his greatness, a reassment of her faith—in the first line of the poem she quantifies her faith as "larger than the hills," and in the first line of the last verse she basically reverses that quantification saying that she cannot "stint [her] faith" (now her faith isn't just "larger than," it's endless)."

After re-reading that, I realize I probably ought to get some of my money back because it is fairly clear I don't know what I'm talking about half of the time. But, I decided, I really do like the poem. So I thought I'd share. And ask for more opinions/interpretations/help. Any ideas? On the Purple Wheel? The poem as a whole? A nice older gentleman is waiting for an answer ... preferably better than the one I just gave.

PS Sorry this is so long. If you're still reading, I apologize.

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More ways to waste time on-line

But these are really good ways ... you know, the kind you can mindlessly play at ... the kind your baby will enjoy too ...

The first is a site called Line Rider. Basically, you draw a line, any line, and this little penguin on a sled (with a red scarf that waves in the wind) will ride down the line line you just drew. He'll go off jumps, do flips, crash if your line isn't right—it's great.

The second is a site that turns you into an artist. Just start moving your mouse and clicking.

Enjoy!

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Interesting Blog

I just wanted to point out to all of you this blog I found referenced on Eric Snider's website.

http://sugar-beet.blogspot.com/
It is apparently a sort of mormon version of The Onion. I think Eric Snider said he wrote one of the articles in their book that they just published.
The best one I've read so far is the one about a miraculous piece of toast with Joseph Smith's face burned on it.

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