All Dressed Up With Nowhere To Go

     I’d like to thank you all for coming out here.  I have an announcement to make.  To be honest, I feel kinda stupid doing this.  In retrospect, I should have just gone ahead with my plan without the announcement, but I already sent out the e-mail telling everyone to come to my blog for more information on this and I don’t think they’ll want to read about my flowers (pretty as they are).  So here goes.  I, Shaun Carlson, am giving up the Internet in my home and the use of my computer.

     Jerks.  What was that for?  Because I know a lot of you are laughing at me right now.  “What?  Shaun?  The guy who has grown up with computers and who has hardly gone a day without using them or the Internet is giving them up?  What a joke!”

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     Just a quick item before we begin.  I’ve been listening to the soundtrack to “The Phantom of the Opera” intermittently while writing this, so if my writing at some point suddenly becomes lyrical or melodramatic (more so than usual), you’ll know why.

     Whether or not my garden was a success depends entirely on how you choose to look at it.  In terms of actual production, it was a flop, and a fantastic one at that.  I planted about twenty different types of plants.  Five grew: the corn, two pea types, sunflowers, and the zinnia.  From these five, production was probably around a tenth of capacity.  If that.  So I’m looking at around two and a half per cent yield.  That’s not enough to break even (and it certainly doesn’t take much to break even on just the price of the seeds vs. the price of the produce).

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     This is actually a response that I had to another blog and its subsequent discussion.  It was going to just be a comment, but as usual, it became something that would be better off left as its own entry with a reference to the original work.  Make sure you read it first (it’s not that long) and also the blog it references (also not very long.  Seriously, what is my problem?) so that what follows makes sense.

     Ugh.  I am so not reading what I think I am reading.  No, I agree that fiction is not inherently “wrong” or “evil”.  However, the problem with fiction is just that.  It’s fiction.  It’s a complete other world, universe, belief system, etc. that does not exist but in the minds of the participants.  If taken too far, this becomes a means of escapism for people, a way to leave and ignore the world as it is in favor of this more pleasing alternative.

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     I just finished watching “The Village” and is my mind blown.  It’s something I couldn’t start to process until a few minutes after the movie was over.

     The first thing I want to say is that I am deeply impressed by how well the loose ends were tied up.  One of my pet peeves in movies would be when there are gaping plot-holes or inconsistencies with the story or just bad physics.  I know that these are for entertainment purposes, but I think it is better to sacrifice a really intense moment, line, or idea to keep something at least reasonably believable.  But this is me and I seem to annoy most everyone when I mention some of these things.  In all fairness, I can be overly nit-picky and can work on that.

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(AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is likely to be edited for length within the next day or two) 

mythbust
v. mythbusted, mythbusting, mythbusts
v. intr.

1. The act of debunking myths and false rumors that get passed around as truth or as common knowledge.

     OK, I have a question that I would like you all to answer, in all seriousness. It sounds a bit arrogant and pretentious of me, but I honestly believe(d) that everyone has(had) this capability. Can you tell when someone is telling you something that’s not true? This incorporates when someone is outright lying, but I also mean when someone is telling you something that is not true even though they may believe it is true themselves. Like an urban legend or one of the many incorrect “common-knowledges”.

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     Feeling is hard.  Feelings themselves are hard as well, but the act of feeling is even more so.  Whenever I begin to feel something as complex as love or sadness or joy or wonder, any ability I have to order words is gone and I stand helpless in the flow of pure emotion.  I don’t like it.

     Well, let me clarify that.  I love to experience all of those emotions, even sadness on occasion.  It helps me remember the role I play, willingly or not, in this great play of life.  But being unable to share that feeling, the inability to articulate the complexity of my experience deadens it and almost defeats its purpose.  Yes I get to feel it, but to me, feelings are largely meaningless if you can’t/don’t share them.  It’s only been in the sharing of my joy with those closest to me, my friends and family, that I have ever truly enjoyed it.

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     I would like to preface this by stating that what follows originally started out as a response-post.  However, I soon realized it was going way beyond the scope of just a response and needed to be set aside as an idea to be fleshed out all on its own.  I really don’t want to go back and re-write all of it so I’ll just present it here as it was.  I think it’s written such that it works without having to touch it up to “blog post” status (mostly), but there may be a couple of confusions so it would be helpful to read Homosexuality and Modernism.  Were it a comment, it would have followed MissJedi’s first comment, comment number eight.

     I agree from a moral perspective on the practice, as I’ve said.  But the thing is, we do not live in a theocracy.  We live in a democratic (never mind the semantics regarding the representation) nation that claims that my religious/moral beliefs are no more or less valid than yours.  In that light, it seems to me that the primary consideration the law should consider is how something affects the personal freedoms and liberties of others.

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     While perusing an associate’s writings, I came across this article of his on homosexuality and the subsequent discussion on it.  It’s an issue I’ve wrestled with in my mind a great deal, especially when I found out one of my step-brothers was gay.  To me, he was a shining example of what a faithful Latter-Day Saint should be.  He knew of the doctrine and of current events and enjoyed discussing them (not debating them, which I still find amazing).  He was kind, funny, and almost always pleasant mannered.  The only time I heard him raise his voice or yell was at me once and I thoroughly deserved it. 

     I looked forward every year to Christmas and New Year’s as a kid, not because of the presents or time off or holiday season, but because Robert would come up from Salt Lake City and I and my step-siblings would get together to play games.  We played board games like Monopoly, Life, and Scrabble.  We would even play a couple of card games and games like Jenga. 

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While perusing the APOD (Astronomy Picture Of the Day), I came across a blurb written by an astrophotographer on the ethics of using technology in taking pictures in astronomy.  His arguments were a little long and rambling (like a certain author I know), but I thought he made a good point.  Especially when he talked about people, tools, and evil.  Anyway, here is the article for your perusal and consideration.  One might just read it with only the narrow view of astrophotography (as it specifically discusses), but I think he was getting at something bigger.  I would just like to say that it pretty much “sums” up my views on ethics as well.

     Nearly every post I write is laden with puns, one-liners, hyperbole, and other devices of humor.  This reflects my personal philosophy as to my outlook on life.  When I read the paper or other news or look out into the world, I see people who are humorless.  People who take things, even small trivial things, so seriously that there is no room for error.  Indeed, even perfection would not be good enough in such an environment.  There are times when ill feelings such as indignation are appropriate, but it seems to me that we too quickly default to taking offense over some perceived evil in the world and polarize our view about issues. 

     I want you to know that I try very hard to maintain my humorous (if it can be claimed as funny) outlook on things and to not let things get to me.  I am in deep sincerity when I say that I sometimes have to make a very concentrated effort to find the humor in a situation, to find that view, maybe the only view I can find, where I can chuckle to myself over it.  For if I could not I must surely despair and weep constantly for the horrid state of the world around me and the callousness of its people towards each other and issues that they can impact.  Things that they could make a difference on if they would only take courage and try.

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