Open Letters

Dear friends,

I’ve been applying to medical schools again lately. After getting rebuffed in my attempts at getting into med school for the past 2 years, I think I’ve been subliminally trying to sabotage my chances at getting in. I spun my wheels on my letter of intent for weeks, hiding in my other work and doing everything other than my med school application. In order to get the application in, I’ve been hiding from everything else, not answering e-mails, not reading or commenting on blogs, not even taking time to cook. Things are a little less crazy for me now that the application is done so If you’ve written me an e-mail lately I’ll get back to you when I start to empty out my account.

Dear Lina,

Thanks a ton for all the help writing my letter of intent. There’s a metric ton of pie that will be waiting for you next time you visit Chicago.

Dear Oasis,

Your song Wonderwall has been my favorite song since it first came out. Recently, however, I have decided that Lali Puna’s Faking the Books is my new favorite song. I’m not sure if I love it so much because I learned to appreciate European techno dance beats while in Germany, because of her charming pronunciation of the word “books,” or because I like the rest of Lali Puna’s music so much that it’s biasing my opinion of my favorite of her songs. By the way, with few exceptions, I think most of your other music is mediocre at best. In any case, the song makes me want to smile and cry at the same time. Give it a listen (it’s better with headphones than speakers).

Dear St. Vincent,

Amanda and I caught your concert last month at the Metro and it was fabulous. Although my favorite songs of yours are on your first album, Actor is very solid as an album, and well worth the good reviews it’s been getting. By the way, I think Amanda might like you more than me because of your music video, but I will be rather upset if you seduce her away from me. In fact, if Amanda leaves me for you, I will make an active effort to not recommend your music anymore. You’ve been warned.

Dear absentee landlord of my new apartment,

First off let me say how much I love the place; I particularly love the kitchen and Amanda is thrilled with the wood floors. That being said, your policy against dogs is absurd so I’ve decided not to follow it. Amanda and I recently bought a mini-poodle puppy and named it Gob (in honor of Will Arnett’s character from Arrested Development, although I love the homophonic parallel to the Biblical Job). Amanda’s been teaching him tricks and he’s also already litter trained, so your floors are safe. On a side note, Amanda gave him a haircut but spared the hair on his legs so that we can dye it. For now, it looks like he’s wearing a pair of really baggy pants. A-freaking-dorable if I do say so myself. If you ever decide to enforce your no dog rule—despite Gob’s adorableness—we’ll have to loan our dog to family or friends, which would be very sad for us and for Gob. If you do crack down, however, we’re pretty sure that someone on the third floor has a dog too, and it’s likely that any stray dog poop came from that dog, not Gob.

Dear messers Ensign and Sanford,

I’ll say the same thing I said while you were vehemently calling for President Clinton to step down: your sex life is none of my business and has zero determination on whether you can or should be a politician. Even still, I find irony rather funny and giggled inside when you were caught. I still feel sorry for Mrs. Ensign.

Dear Mrs. Sanford,

You are supremely ridiculous. I won’t even dignify your argument by refuting it. (Evan has pointed out that this was satire. Sorry Ms. Sanford).

Dear Ms. Palin,

I actually rather like you as a person. I think your opinions on abortion are medieval (or Italian) and your notions on science are damaging and ridiculous, but my ire for you only extends to your ability to use your crazy notions to make policy. Now that there’s no chance of you having access to a red button or the chance to slash science funding, I wish you all the best in writing books or working for FOX news. If you run for the presidency in 2012, however, we’re no longer friends.

Dear squirrel that keeps eating the tomatoes we’re growing on our back porch,

If you insist on stealing my tomatoes, is it too much to ask that you eat the whole thing, rather than just half? I have enough tomatoes on my plant that I probably won’t notice if you take a few, but I’d swear you’re taunting me by leaving an uneaten half right in front of my door. There are starving squirrels in China who would love those tomatoes, young man.

Dear Harry Potter movies,

I’m going to have to ask you to scale back the tween romance a lot. I know you might be tempted to cash in on the Twilight craze that has the kids shelling out good money to lust after rather awkward-looking heartthrobs, but Rupert Grint is actively hard to look at; ask J.K. if you couldn’t just write him out of the next few movies as much as possible. On your latest installment: although there were some things that could have been done better, the cave scene was excellent, as was Alan Rickman. I do have to say, however, that all of your movies end approximately 30 seconds too late. Please make an effort not to end on awkward anti-climaxes or freeze-frames in the future.

Dear President Obama,

Please focus; Professor Gates should not be on your radar right now. Health care is broken, nobody else is going to bother even trying to fix it, and it will not bode well for you if congress can’t get its crap together and pass a bill. Even a broken plan would probably be better than what we have got now and there will always be time to tweak later what you pass right now. Perhaps I’ll write more on the health debate later.

Dear Hyde Park Ward,

Thank you for not celebrating Pioneer Day or assigning the sacrament speakers to talk about pioneers. If I have to listen to one more person tell me that their great great grandparents were more righteous than mine because theirs were driven at gunpoint to Utah and mine weren’t I think I’m going to pitch a fit.

Dear clutch from my 2002 Hyundai Accent,

I thought we were tight. You’d been going strong for almost 100,000 miles and then you decided to try and strand me in rural Kansas, rather than lasting another 150 miles until I got to Wichita? Luckily for me I have really cool in-laws who have AAA and were able to bail us out and foil your scheme. I have a new clutch that’s apparently worth $800, so I don’t need you anymore. You’re dead to me. I hope they melt you down and turn you into something really awful and degrading like parts for public toilets or limited edition Jonas Brothers wrist watches.

Food blog

Amanda and I have decided to start a separate blog for our cooking. You can read that at amandaanddaine.wordpress.com.

Don't you love the double a and then the double d in that address? Maybe I'm just easily entertained.

-est

So I normally won't even consider posting unless I've been able to read and re-read what I've written for cohesiveness and style; I'm not so much concerned with documenting or saying anything with this blog as I am about writing and exploring my own thoughts. My life and mind have been full enough with superlatives of late, however, and I thought it might be appropriate to run through them in a blog, even though the inevitable product will be yet another superlative--the worst, least polished post that I've blogged.

Depending on which of my friends you ask, they will either tell you that I am illiterate (in the sense that I don't read, not that I can't), or that I actually rather enjoy reading and do it frequently. Since so many of my friends are fantastically brilliant and literary--my friend Lina just got into the Iowa Writer's Workshop and my friend Ryan has an agent and is working on publishing his first novel (which I will promote here further when it's out, btw), for example--I generally err on the side of telling people that I essentially don't read; I read more than most Americans do, sure, but I'm still by far the least well-read person in my circle of friends (by virtue of who they are, not because of me). I mostly dabble in literature, reading the high points of authors who come recommended to me. I re-read the Prydain series by Lloyd Alexander every year or two, and I generally try to avoid reading things which are "classics," but which aren't particularly beautiful, uplifting, or engaging (can I have the time I spent on the unabridged Les Miserables back, please?). So when I saw that Atonement was being made into a movie a few years ago, and one that received middling reviews from the people I trusted, I assumed it would be a fun, Divinci Code-esque piece of fiction that I could wait to borrow from a friend or find in a paperback blow-out bin at some point in the distant future. With such low expectations for it, I was blown away when Alea--one of my hyper-literate friends and most trusted recommenders of books--told me that it was his favorite book ever (or did he say he thought it was the best? I can't remember any more). I bought it a few weeks ago, put it into my queue of books to read, and finally finished reading it through yesterday. I want to avoid giving an in-depth review of it right now because I would not do it justice under such time constraints. I will say, however, that in the past two days, totally unrelated trains of thought have been interrupted by the overwhelming feeling of amazement at how fantastically good that book was. When Alea claimed that Atonement was his favorite book he set the bar and my expectations pretty high. I'd still say he understated his case.

A surprisingly large number of you remembered that it was my birthday last week and sent me your best wishes. Although such thing always makes me feel a little bad since I don't know the birth dates of even my closest friends, it was very nice of so many of you to inquire how I am doing and wish me well on my birthday. I gave different answers to different people depending on how willing I was to share my disappointment at once again failing to get into medical school this year (there is still technically the chance that I'll hear back, but the fact that only one school has even given me an answer is a pretty clear indication that I'm being received with a resounding "meh" from the universe). The past week has given a little more perspective on my lot in life, however, so I'd like to upgrade my answers from last week from "I'm ok" to "quite well, thank you."

My other parents--not in a Coraline sense, but in the sense that I married in to their family--sent me a gift certificate to Amazon.com. Although Amanda and I do most of our non-food shopping on Amazon, and generally have a long list of things we want to buy from Amazon when extra money shows up, I have actually been somewhat stumped as to what I should get with my birthday money. Since Christmas, I have been given a series of the best and most thoughtful gifts I have ever gotten in my life: a bread maker, a cuisinart food processor, the most amazing thermoses ever, a fabulous cookbook, some kitchen items I use every day, a winter coat, and dozens of other really useful and cool things. It's not that I won't be able to find something fabulous to buy on Amazon with my gift certificate, but my moments of being stumped helped remind me just how well I'm doing and how content I am right now. And so, even though I'm still a bit upset that I've spent another thousand dollars we don't really have applying in vain to medical schools, I'm terribly excited that I might be able to teach science to middle- or high-schoolers next year. My absolute back up will be to work as a CNA in a hospital or nursing home, which has become something I truly love doing.

As always, there are dozens of things I could bring up that have happened to me in the past weeks or months that have been awesome or annoying. Right now, however, I'm sitting on my couch next to Amanda, eating some delicious corn bread I just baked, listening to Vince Guiraldi's Charlie Brown Christmas music. And so to answer your inquiries into how I'm doing, I guess my answer is that, as always, I'm sure things could be better. The fact that I'd have to think about how they could be better, however, is probably the most articulate answer I could give.

with his learner's permit in his pocket, he swerved, to avoid a porcupine, and drove straight into a large tree.

As a child, my family went camping at Pioneer Park on the shore of Lake Michigan. I remember once spending the better part of a day building a sand castle. When I went back the next day, eager to continue adding on to my fantastic creation, I found that someone had wantonly destroyed it. Although I had realized from the start that building sand castles is a very transient pleasure, and that weather would undo my labors very quickly, I was nonetheless very disappointed that my work had been purposely and needlessly wasted.

I learned this week that BYU has once again decided to kick down my sand castle.

There are few things that I am as unabashedly proud and excited about as the things I did for BYU Speech and Debate. When I joined the team in January of 2004, there were only a handful of people coming to the meetings. Clinton and Lee, the founders of the group, told me that the team was only quasi-official, that permission had been granted to form the club and debate on weekends, but that traveling or officially representing BYU was expressly forbidden; BYU had had an official CEDA-style team in the 80's that had been caught cheating before the team was disbanded. Of course, we did travel to tournaments and officially represent BYU, but we drove there in our own cars, paid our own admission fees, and rented just one hotel room for each sex, regardless of fire-code prohibitions or questions of comfort. With so much work to go around, I was given responsibilities from day one, whether it was to register the teams, find new fund-raising methods, or teach lessons on a current event that I had studied the previous week. I loved debate and spent hundreds of hours preparing, practicing, and discussing it.

After a few years, I had become the most senior person on the team. I had gone to every tournament twice, I had phone numbers for bishops in Wyoming that would let us sleep on couches while we were there for tournaments, and the improvements we had made to our fund-raising high-school debate tournament had made the venture profitable, which made it much less expensive to be on the team. All in all, I think I did a pretty good job of running the debate team and training the next group of kids how to debate well; we regularly won tournaments against teams with full-time debate coaches and school-funded transportation.

Despite my advice to the following generation of debaters to keep the team on the down low and to keep our rituals hidden from the BYU administrators, however, the team applied for and got funding through the political science department, started renting BYU vans to drive to tournaments, and published their successes in the Daily Universe for all to see. Then, after a BYU baseball player sued the school because he had hurt himself while driving to an away game, BYU cracked down and canceled all traveling clubs. The debate team's official status became the weapon that BYU used to dismantle it.

Although someone might someday reconstitute a traveling team or even successfully lobby the powers that be for permission to travel to tournaments, their labors will be their own. My contributions, and the sense of pride I felt in passing on a better-organized, more prestigious team is now gone. Someone was foolish enough to trust that BYU would let something beautiful, educational, and totally harmless survive. I only wish I could muster a sense of surprise.

And so I will admit my public defeat. I am not ashamed to pay maudlin tribute to something that shaped me so profoundly, and that I loved so much. I'm not going to moralize, nor will there be an afternoon-special-style lesson that will put this into a greater context. I knew that someone down the line would drop the ball and BYU Speech and Debate would die. Debate was mine. It still is. Maybe now even more than ever.

then I developed a drinking problem

For as long as I can remember, I have had a leaky epiglottis. Even as I started to write this post, some of the hot chocolate I was sipping started going down my trachea, causing me to cough uncontrollably. I’m not complaining too loudly about this physiological quirk—when so many people inherit higher risks for diseases like diabetes, heart disease, or cancer, I got lucky and only inherited baldness, poor circulation (which causes me to wear gloves 9 months out of the year), and an epiglottis that sometimes makes a weak seal.

Growing up thus with the habit of choking on beverages, I very often heard the phrase “it looks like your drink went down the wrong pipe.” Because of this turn of phrase I envisioned metal pipes in my body (floating in cavernous space), one for food and one for air throughout much of my young life. As I grew up and learned more things, my vision of the two-pipes-theory was corrected and expanded; the original model I had been given was not necessarily incorrect, just too simple to be functionally useful or to mesh with deeper understandings of biology and anatomy.
As many of you know, the last few months have been very contentious in the world of Mormonism. I’ve devoted most of my blog time to arguing against the Church’s position on gay marriage and I’ve been in e-mail and phone debates with a few of you about the role of women in society and the Church. Although I am a fierce debater when I want to be (or when I am doing it competitively), I also pride myself on being fairly respectful and even-handed with the other side, conceding points readily, admitting where my argumentation is weakest, and not being purposefully manipulative (although I think I could do it better than some, if I really wanted to). One argument I’ve been hearing a lot of lately, and one that I want to clarify here, is that the gospel is simple.

Elder Caussé gave a rather good talk on this subject in the Sunday morning session of General Conference. He points out that, although God will always work on our level of understanding, and that faith and righteousness do not require a PhD in theology, that God does expect us to constantly be improving our knowledge if we expect to attain salvation. Simplistic, pat answers, laundry lists given during Sunday School (“go to Church, read your scriptures, etc.” given as an answer to every question), or a profoundly weak understanding of scripture or doctrine are good enough for those who are new in the Church, but are unacceptable for members who should have learned more in their time in the Church. I feel that there is the erroneous belief in the Church that a “simple faith”—complete with an understanding which is totally stripped of any nuance or individual opinions—is somehow superior in a gospel or righteousness sense to what those fancy-pants intellectual members believe. If you can’t already tell from my tone what I think about this stance, I would simply like to point out that Christ knew the scriptures on a very deep level and debated it often with the students of the law.

At its most fundamental level, there is an amazingly simple beauty in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Faith in the doctrines and examples of Jesus Christ can provide the basis of ethical, socially-responsible behavior and can lead to well-adjusted, psychologically-stable development. When followed appropriately, the teachings of Jesus coordinate very well with just laws, many different political systems, and within the confines of different cultural backgrounds and perspectives.

The belief that “the gospel is simple,” however, is currently being used as poetic license to oversimplify complex issues and defend a reductive, reactionary worldview. Even if “the gospel is simple,” ethical, political, or philosophical decisions rarely if ever are. In any case, the self-satisfied, check-and-mate-attitude the Christian right exudes when debating their points is unbecoming, both to reasonable, thoughtful people but also to those who follow Christ’s examples from the scriptures (but not the political movement that has attempted to co-opt His name). Evangelicals might smugly point out that Paul preached against homosexuality, but they must then be able to defend the fact that he also recommended against marriage of any kind. I’m not trying to say that the Bible is too contradictory to serve as a basis for argument, simply that the Bible is an incredibly complex book with a complex history. You will have to forgive me for finding it scary if people believe that the Bible is a word-perfect transcript from the mouth of God, uninflected by history, culture, or the opinions and weaknesses of the individual writers.

When all is said and done, there really are two pipes that my hot chocolate can go down—the trachea or the esophagus. Although further nuance or understanding of the glottal system do not fundamentally change the two-pipe model, they do allow for an understanding why the epiglottis works like it does. If someone were to perform a surgery on my epiglottis to fix my propensity to choke on water, I would demand that they know a lot more about the organ (can I even call it an organ?) than I did when I was six (what nerve innervates it, how it interacts with its surroundings, how surgery might affect it, etc.).

We need to trade in our child-like understanding for a child-like faith. We need to trade in a culture which glories in ignorance for one that seeks to understand everything that God would have us understand. We need to abandon the notion that a testimony of the truth is based on feeling the spirit, rather than having the spirit teach us through our minds and our hearts. We need to come to a fundamentally sound understanding about what the Bible is and what it teaches before we use it as a weapon against societal change. In the long run, such tactics will only lower the credibility of the Bible as a holy book and our Church as a voice of faith and reason. If we collectively make religion a simpler, less well-thought-out alternative to science and reason, we may just find that science and reason will eventually replace religion in the public sphere entirely. There are intelligent arguments and philosophies that can be based upon Christian thought. In as far as Christians insist that the gospel is simple, and thus not worth serious argumentation or analysis, they will continue to fallaciously defend misogyny, racism, homophobia, and theocracy in the name of the "simple" gospel. Important parts of the gospel are undeniably simple; defending bad arguments by an appeal to a tacit orthodoxy, however, is worse than blasphemous--it’s simple-minded and just bad debate.

shaken, not stirred

Last night I experienced my most unique, and also unwanted stories I have ever collected. While traveling home on the train, I was robbed at gunpoint. Although the robbers only took my wallet and Zune, and the Zune was recovered when one of the suspects was arrested by the police shortly after the robbery, I had to spend almost 8 full hours identifying the suspects, filing reports, waiting for the state attorney to arrive, and then making another statement. Perhaps if I went to bed right now, rather than staying up to write this post, I might have a much more flippant or jocular take on tonight's events. As it is, however, I can't help but feel immensely lucky and maudlin in my gratitude for almost everything in my life.

For as much as I like to complain and whine about the way things are in this world, I cannot imagine loving my life any more than I do. Fear of death probably always reminds people just how much they owe to the people and organizations they love. I am no exception to this. If I haven't told you just how much I love and appreciate you all lately, shame on me.

I am pained to tears that 3 people felt that the best possible use of their time and energies would be to take and gun onto the red line and try and make their own luck. Before any of you judge these people too harshly, try and imagine how much of your own life would need to be stripped away before you would seriously consider such an option to be your best possible choice. With a gun to my chest, I realized just how much I had to lose, and how little the robbers probably felt they had to lose. These individuals are ultimately responsible for their own actions (probably to the tune of 5 years in prison, to be exact), but I cannot help but feel sad and a bit ashamed that society has left these people with such bad options. When the choices I make revolve around whether to study for a few extra hours or to watch a Tarkovski film from Netflix, there's a pretty stark difference between the life opportunities and paths afforded to me versus what was afforded them.

I am grateful for a relatively just and responsive society. When I called 911 after the robbers left the train, I was expecting my story to be filed under the crime statistics and a half-hearted search effort to be made in a few days. Instead, a dozen police responded within minutes and two out of the three suspects were arrested within half an hour of my call. They say that there are no atheists in foxholes. I would submit that there are no Lockeans in police stations; society and how we get along matters a whole lot when civility breaks down and crimes are committed.

My sleepiness is starting to overwhelm my emotions and excitement, so I will end this here and go get some sleep. I plan on returning to my normal, philosophical, sometimes belligerent posts soon. Before I had time to really reflect upon, edit, or even rationalize my thoughts and feelings, however, I felt I should get them down. It normally takes me days or weeks to find the inspiration to write and edit a post for this blog. Today, all it took was a pistol.

A new leaf

If any of you have ever kept up a correspondance with me--any form of relationship which does not involve me seeing you and offering you food--you know that I tend to write in spurts. When I have the time, I check my e-mail every hour, write back immediately when written to, and do my best to find pithy things to say or funny things to link you to to illustrate my points. When time is not so plentiful, however, my inbox fills up with friendly letters that I want to respond to, but which I put off until I have more time to kill.

As far as I can tell, this pattern is pretty normal behavior. I read everyone's blog who reads and comments on this blog (if there are more of you who read this, let me know so that I can keep up with your blog too. I didn't realize that most of you even had blogs until you posted and I could see your profile) and I notice that my reader fills up much slower when schools have finals or midterms coming up.

My problem has always been that I have a hard time writing short e-mails or posting something here without devoting a lot of my time and chi to it. When I forget to write one of you for six months or more, I feel like it would be inappropriate to re-establish contact with a "hey [insert neglected friend's name here], how's life? I'm doing well. Talk to you later." Instead of writing something polite, yet managable, however, I feel like I need to write something epic to make up for my jerkiness in not having written in so long. Inevitably, said epic e-mail rarely gets finished; it sits in my draft folder until the details and wittiness have withered away and I delete it in shame. The longer this cycle goes on, the more awkward it becomes for me to re-establish contact with you. I usually just wait for you to write me and tell me that you've gotten married and had 2 children since I last talked to you. Somehow this seems less awkward to me than writing an e-mail that I can finish in one sitting.

So, in an attempt to combat this neurosis, and in celebration that my first quarter at Northwestern has come to a close, I decided to finish a post, just to prove to myself that I can. I have significant starts on posts on half a dozen subjects I've been thinking about for the last month but most of them will probably never materialize into a form that I would post it here.

So for those of you who still read this (I know that my mother has dropped out), I really appreciate that you still want to keep in touch with me and read what I write. If you're reading this to see how I've been doing since the last time I wrote you an e-mail allow me to apologize--there's a long message waiting for you in my draft folder somewhere, I promise.