All My Gettings

Throughout Salt Lake, there are ads that appeared about a month ago. They are for the Utah Republican Party, which as we all know is an organization that really needs to sell itself to its target audience. I mean, Utah is, after all, a battleground state.

These ads are a play on the fact that Republican contains the words "I can". (Those GOPsters! Their wit amazes!) They finish out that sentence with things like "I can start my dream business", "I can prosper", or "I can dream big" (democrats, it appears only squelch dreams. Because they're Marxists.) I think, though, to be fair, we should expand the options of finishing this setence to some other things that the Utah Republican Party supports.

Here's some examples to get started:

• I can work four jobs and still not afford health insurance
• I can marry the person I love, unless that person is the same sex as I am
• I can adopt children (assuming I'm married)
• I can pray at school events
• I can work way past retirement age, because social programs are a sign of weakness.
• I can get an abortion, maybe. And only after my husband's been notified
• I can pay less tax and still complain when the government doesn't run smoothly
• I can expand offshore drilling
• I can fight an unwinnable war for decades

Got any others to add?

Yesterday, I wore a cardigan, a bow tie and my tortoise shell plastic glasses to church. I could not have looked more poindexter-y if I were actively trying. Though, my intellectual garb did help when I was glowering over the speaker who spoke in favor of Prop 8.

I also spent a large chunk of yesterday watching episodes of Brothers & Sisters. I rather like this show, but I started noticing with the second season how each of the characters really only faces one issue. Justin is the addicted war vet, Kitty is the politico, Sarah is coping with family/work balance as a working, now divorced, mother, and Kevin is a relationship-phobic gay man. Whenever we see the characters, they're either coping with their topical trouble or are interacting with other family members on theirs. Because I've just noticed this (I'm nothing if not an indulgent viewer), they're starting to seem a bit flat. Even now, when they're trying to pull other dimensions to these characters' lives (like Kitty's Kinderlust), they don't come off as entirely authentic.

I wonder, though, if this isn't the appeal of the show. Rather than being a show about a single person coping with a wide-range of life challenges, B&S manages to make itself identifiable on a level that transcends personality. Viewers aren't forced to agree or identify with a real human, but with a shorthand version of a personal struggle, something they've probably faced themselves in a slightly different twist. In this sense, it's sort of like a well-crafted, disguised modern morality play. It helps that the writing is crisp, the acting spot-on and heartstrings just sufficiently tugged.

If I were a real cultural studies type, I'd probably spend some time writing academic articles about this series. One thing that'd be really interesting is to track is the amount of time spent on each Walker family member. If the show runs for several seasons (which it should, since it's one of the best serial dramas on right now), you could then even watch the evolution of issues across time and the concerns of the general public. Or explore which two characters/issues interact the most and what the intent of the writers is in doing that. Sigh...I really should just go back to academia, shouldn't I?

I had a very typical alea moment yesterday in church. Our Elders' Quorum lesson focused on home teaching. Of course, there were the standard comments that we need to do it so that the sisters have the priesthood in their homes (a problematic position, given the fact that brethren also need that same priesthood and because I feel like giving blessings is a fairly minor function of the ward teaching effort). So, basically, it was the same lesson you get about once a year in EQ.

Some background first: I'm at a point right now where I'm not too keen on the Church. In fact, I'm sort of Jack Twist-y about it all, what with wishing I knew how to quit it and all that jazz. In my current mood, I was convinced that I would turn out a home teaching route. I think it'd be better for all parties involved, plus I'm not sure I'm even allowed to have a route right now. The lesson, therefore, wasn't really high on my list of things to care about.

Then, at the end of the hour, the president of the quorum read off the companionships. My name was not included. I felt a bit angry about that. Then, just as I was heating up to it, I realized that, really, my ward had no way to win with me on this one and I was being silly. I ought to just back off, I figure. Though, maybe I should allow those irritations to grow, because the awesome Sunday School teacher that had pretty much kept me active with her lessons left the ward yesterday. It's a sad day to be sure.

A couple days ago, I finished the book The White Tiger. It's been long-listed for the Booker this year and is a nice mixture of really funny moments and terribly sad ones. Well, the whole novel is run through with a sense of despair, so maybe there's just some really funny ways of looking at all that degradation. Should some enterprising grad student need a topic for a contemporary fiction class, take this one: Compare the attitudes and modes of service found in the servant character-narrators of Remains of the Day and The White Tiger. (Can we just pause for a minute to smile at the fact that, in England, literary prizes are part of the provenance of bookies? And that there are odds for presumed winners?)

I realized, after listing this book in my journal of books read, that I somehow managed to go the entire month of July without completing a single novel. How did this happen? I blame Gilmore Girls, mostly. Because, see, my family and I are working our way through all seven seasons. Now, if I were watching them by myself, this would be a three week project. As it is, we've spent a solid two months chipping away at them, one or two episodes a night. So, that saps my evenings. Then, we've got the new morning church, so that cuts into my Sunday am reading. Also, being in class two nights a week doesn't help.

Really, though, I think I'm getting sort of intellectually lazy. I don't think as much, or as thoroughly, about anything any more. I've been ruined and I'm not sure what's the culprit. Maybe it's my working life, where I've just this week been informed, will now include doing financial aid appointments with students. Apparently, running a library, riding shotgun for student affairs, pinch-hitting in the bookstore, ordering textbooks, chairing a scholarship committee and being the errand boy for the academic team adds up to "having a lot of free time" and "being able to help out during this crisis". I have all sorts of bad things to say about this, but I'll probably just get too worked up if I start. On the plus side, being trained in yet another area will make me that much more employable, if suddenly all those predictions come true and libraries cease to exist in five years.

At any rate, I should get back into the habit of reading. Especially if I'm hoping to get all the Booker longlist read before they announce the winner. And then, I can scoff when Rushdie has another accolade. Because, c'mon, doesn't anyone else deserve a little something-something, Man Group?

In Sunday School this week, someone brought up the fact that, if we want to see a good example of fatherhood, we should look to our Heavenly Father. Now, I'm a fan of God, in particular the Mormon conception of God, but let's think about this assertion. Imagine for a minute that you're going to pattern your life as the head of your household after him. Here's some things you should probably do:

• Never show up in person
• Expect seemingly impossible things of your children
• Only be willing to accept your children if they do precisely what you want them to
• Demand that your way is better and require submission to it
• Don't communicate openly with them
• Give them examples of seriously injuring your other children as an impetus to shape up
• Make arbitrary rules, and change them from time to time
• Make your oldest son do most of the work
• Allow all sorts of bad things to happen to your kids, because you can't stop their siblings from being mean to them

It's pretty obvious I shouldn't go to church when I'm a snarky mood, right?

So, imagine for a moment you've baptized your ancestors by proxy. All is kosher and recorded, and they accept it and all that jazz. If the same folks have their corpses re-animated as zombies, would they be members of the church? Would we give them callings? What sort of first presidency missives would we see?

The theological concerns aside, I smell a good Mormon gothic novel here. A mysterious source turns the dead into zombies, but only the dead who haven't had their work done for them. What's that you say? Let the dead bury the dead? Well, if you don't get your genealogy done, it'll be more let my dead eat you! That'll light a fire under the saints' complacency, won't it?

Relatedly, I wonder if this is the real reason the church won't let us do ordinance work until one year after a person dies. I mean, surely the zombie window expires once the corpse isn't a fleshy creature. Granted, what with sealed coffins and embalming fluid, bodies stay bodies far longer. Thus, maybe the lesson we should learn here is that modern mortuary practices are a tool of the adversary.

They, monogamy, and extending the priesthood to all races is pretty much a sign of the apocalypse.

I'm a tv on dvd junkie. I seriously cannot get enough. To me, a weekend can rarely be better spent than watching an entire season of this or that. The trick, in my current situation, is to find shows that invite my family's participation. Well, this is in addition to the trick of finding shows worth the emotional and chronological investment. For instance, my mom and brother could not get into The Closer, despite it being totally hilarious (if you don't think a police procedural can be funny, you need to rent a few discs of this). Yet, at the same time, my dad balks over Veronica Mars. And Battlestar Galactica is out, because my mom won't attempt to watch sci-fi. We did all get into Psych, and Law & Order is a good standby for our evenings. Part of the problem is that my parents won't watch most PG-13 movies, so a lot of shows are "bad" in their eyes. That means I won't be consuming the Sopranos with them and Six Feet Under is right out. Hell, even Dead Like Me can't make the cut.

So, in my recent trying to find something new, interesting and relatively clean, I decided to try Gilmore Girls. I have some friends who are big fans, friends whose taste I trust. I had also heard that the dialogue is lighting quick and that they pack in more cultural references than any normal person could pick up on. I scoffed at the latter. I mean, sure, I may miss the popular music ones, but I'm pretty in-the-know. Surely the writers are playing to a denominator that is slightly below mine. Mercy was I wrong. I feel, at times, that watching episodes require the viewer to have handy access to wikipedia. The allusions are so dense, so fast and furious, so arcane that no one short of a demi-god could get them all. However, and here's why I think the show works so well, the jokes are throwaways. You never need to catch them all to follow the plot, understand the argument or even enjoy the show. Sure, it makes me feel sort of dumb, missing so many things that clearly I, as an educated person, should know. But, it's such a wonderful program that I'll keep watching.

Also, may I recommend the following:

• Zooloretto: Spiel des Jahres 2007 in which you're building a zoo. It's fun, not too time-consuming and a great combo of luck and strategy
• Interacting more with your coworkers: last week saw me out of my library a bit more and I had a lovely time of it
• Posting angry pictures of yourself on social networking sites. Apparently, this draws more interest than smiling ones.
• Not getting your hopes up that the LDS Church is becoming more progressive. They'll just crush you a couple of weeks later with a statement to the contrary.
• Brown bagging it

Library Journal is an odd beast. What is it? Is it a professional journal? A mouthpiece for the publishing industry? A source for quality book reviews? I'm continually confused by what it thinks is news (the merger of huge technology companies shows up alongside minor legislation from a tiny town in Alabama). However, there is one thing to be said for it. If you get a review published in LJ, it's probably going to be a positive one. Even when they slam a book, they still recommend it for purchase (hence why I think the publishing industry may be paying some reviewers under the table).

Take this review snippet I read today: "Unfortunately, what lies between the covers is epic only in its absolute failure as a novel of substance and entertainment. The writing is clumsy and derivative, riddled with cliches and plot holes so large one doesn't care whether the family's secrets are revealed at all. And when they are, it is a huge disappointment." Our reviewer closes out his panning with "Recommended for larger public libraries and academic libraries only."

I wonder if this is a strange realization of the ingrained librarian ethic that we no longer are responsible for passing "quality" literature onto our patrons. But surely there's a difference between "quality" and "functioning", non?

The second one here isn't a review so much as a blurb. It comes from Tidal Wave Books, a self-publishing venture based out of Utah somewheres (I assume Utah County, which will be clear in a second). This book, Capitan of My Soul is about a personal transitioning out of homosexuality. I'm weirded out by the ex-gay movement, mostly because nearly all of its proponents seem to be from a different sphere of existence than the one I'm used to. Here's the blurb:

A young LDS man’s true story of being stereotyped and abused by peers as a child, lured into same gender internet pornography during his high school years, and recruited into cursory homosexual experimentation with older men while at Brigham Young University. Shows the undeniable link between internet porn, chat rooms, sex addiction, and homosexuality and the deceitful and predatory nature of the “gay” lifestyle. The story ends happily with his subsequent deliverance and healing through family support, expert professional counseling, truth, and repentance through the Atonement of Jesus Christ.

"lured"? "recruited"? "undeniable"? I feel like there are some assumptions here that need looking into. It makes me even angrier because the first book on this topic, written by the mother of this boy, talks about how he was cured in something ridiculous like 12 therapy sessions. I'm pretty sure that sexual addiction takes a bit longer than that. Also, from a Mormon perspective, isn't it weird to lay so much blame on others for our own sins?

The fact that I get paid to read reviews, though, is still pretty sweet.