Bryce Moore's Blog, page 110
May 7, 2019
Fighting Boredom. Politely
From time to time, I get bored. It happens to the best of us, right? And when I’m bored, I have been known to get inventive to find ways to stop being bored. In the days of smartphones, it usually doesn’t take much to find a distraction to fill however much time you need to fill. Just keep scrolling through Facebook, and it’ll keep churning out stuff it thinks will entertain you, and it’s usually right.
But sometimes it’s just not possible to take out a phone and sit there idly thumbing through the interwebs. Well, I suppose it’s technically possible, but it’s far from polite. There are many situations where it’s a no-no to stare at your phone instead of the person you’re supposed to be meeting with or listening to.
And yet often those meetings are boring. Very, very boring. Soooooooo boring. And so very long. What’s worse is that sometimes I’ll find myself in a meeting listening to things that have nothing to do with why I came to the meeting in the first place. I could be watching paint dry and be more productive.
So what do you do in those situations?
Here are a few of the things I’ve found work for me.
Plot out my next book or scene–true, this only works for writers, but it’s a pretty great trick if you’re ever working on a plot. A lot of that work requires time to think things through properly. The best thing about this is that it also requires you to make notes and look like you’re excited (because when you come up with a new good idea, you *are* excited). Ironically, I almost never take notes at meetings. (The only exception is when I’m committing to actually doing things. I note those down, because lists.) So if you see me writing things down in a meeting, and I haven’t just agreed to do something later? There’s a fairly good chance I’m coming up with ideas for my next book or my next scene.Play the movie mashup game–Take one of your favorite movies. Now take the main character of that movie, and insert a character played by the same actor in a different movie. Chuckle at the result. Rinse, and repeat. I’ll give you a couple of examples. Lee Pace plays Thranduil in the Hobbit movies. He also plays Ronan in Guardians of the Galaxy, and the Pie Maker in Pushing Daisies. What would the Hobbit movies be like if Ronan were to show up? Or if Thranduil could touch dead people to bring them back to life? See? Funny. Or how about Groundhog Day Bill Murray being inserted into Ghostbusters in lieu of Venkman? Amusing! One lovely benefit of this game is it often can lead to ideas for my next book. Multi-tasking for the win!Get other work done. Sometimes if it’s a big meeting, you can appear to be doing work for that meeting when you’re actually doing work for another meeting. I (obviously) don’t use this for important meetings I attend, but I (definitely) do it for long drawn out waste of time meetings like, say, school board meetings where I’m there to vote to pass the budget. My only reason for attending those meetings is to raise my hand at a key point in time. All the bloviating by budget hawks ahead of time? Don’t care to listen to that, thank you very much. So I will bring other things I need to get done. (Plus, the internet speeds in those rooms are usually abysmal, as so many other people are trying to turn to their phone for distraction at the same time.)This is a bit dated, but an old game I’d used to play was “phonetically transcribe the speaker.” Because I’m a linguist, and a geek. I’m rusty on my phonetic transcription skills these days, but I’ll sometimes still turn my focus from what’s being said to how it’s being said, instead. Pick apart accents. Epenthesis is a really fun thing to listen for. It’s when a sound intrudes into places where it doesn’t really belong. Adding /p/ to “something” for example (pronounced sumpthing).
So what techniques do you use? Please share, as I’m sure I could use a few approaches. The number of meetings I find myself in only seems to increase . . .
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
May 6, 2019
Deer Reparations and Sundry Busy-ness
Some days you’re firing on all cylinders, the king of your schedule, and other days, you wonder how in the world you’re ever going to get everything done. (And where did all those items on your To Do list come from in the first place?)
Today is one of those crazy busy days.
On the good news front, I finally took my car in to get repaired from the deer incident over a month ago. (I still had the hunk of deer fur wedged into the fender, because if I have to drive around with a broken headlight for a month, I at least want a public warning posted for any deer that are considering another attack on my vehicle.) It’s been a minor irritant, having to remember to drive Denisa’s car at night, since mine had a tendency to get me pulled over . . .
What else is happening in my life? Adulting. A whole bucketload of adulting. I don’t know when it happened that I suddenly was expected to be the responsible person in the room most of the time, but it seems like the other day I woke up, and everyone else had nominated me and voted me into that position.
So my apologies for having nothing scintillating for you today. I’m barely keeping my nose above water. (Note how late this is finally getting posted. I’d planned to write on my lunch break, but my lunch break ended up having other plans.) As an apology of sorts, I present to you a clip of one of my favorite movies. Ferris Bueller. Because today was very much a day I wish I could have called in sick. Not because of anything terrible going on. Just because I’d rather be out having fun on a gorgeous day.
Happy Monday, everyone!
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
May 2, 2019
The Illusion of Ownership of Time
I like to run a tight schedule. Typically I know what I’m going to do each day well in advance. I have a to do list, I have a packed calendar, and I know everything that needs to happen and when. If I can book something in advance, I am a very happy person. Of course, I also always fall prey to the “Future Bryce will have nothing to do, even though Present Bryce is insanely busy” syndrome, where the me-in-the-present will happily commit the me-in-the-future to do any number of things, even though me-in-the-present has far too much to do. (Mainly because me-in-the-past committed me-in-the-present to doing all these things.)
If only all the different mes would get together and be a bit more coordinated!
However, one thing I have never handled well is spontaneity. I mean, sure, I can decide to do something at the last minute for fun. On the rare occasion I have nothing going on, I can decide to go to the movies or go play a game or something. But when something pops up that I hadn’t been planning on doing?
Me-in-the-present gets very grumpy, and I can’t even blame me-in-the-past.
I re-read this passage in CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters the other day, and he might as well have written it specifically about me:
Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tête-a-tête with the friend), that throw him out of gear. Now he is not yet so uncharitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy are in themselves too much for it. They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own’. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.
I am trying to get over this feeling, because I think I would be a better person if I could. Still, it’s not easy, mainly due to the fact that a lot of the last minute things that crop up are things I feel like should have been planned for more in advance. I plan things out, and so I expect other people to plan things out as well. When they don’t, I question the need for me to be do anything to assist them.
Part of this comes from my career. I see students come in at the last minute, desperate to do research for a paper that’s due the next day (or even in some cases, the next hour!). I try to help them as best as I can, of course, because that’s what librarians do, but I know full well they could have accessed more fitting research materials if they’d only planned better.
“Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency for me.”
I’ve said it to myself many times, and I believe it’s true, but I also believe I likely use it too often as an excuse to not help people as much as I could. I’d like to do better at being a more giving, understanding individual, and I know that relinquishing my death grip on my schedule would help me with this.
Of course, it’s one thing to recognize a goal, and it’s another thing to actually achieve that goal. In the case of my sense of time ownership, I’m trying to just continually remind myself that my schedule does not take priority over other people’s problems. That sounds very cold when I phrase it like that, which is a good reminder to me that I have been too harsh.
So . . . I don’t think I’m going to get magically better at this over night, but I’m making an effort. That’s something, right?
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
May 1, 2019
Let the Renovations Begin
Spring has finally sprung (more or less), and you know what that means! Time to get some more changes done around the house. The other day, our kids asked if there was ever going to come a time when we weren’t doing yearly renovations. It’s a valid question, since we’ve done so much over the years to our house. Part of me assumes that surely there will come a day when there’s only the need to maintain, not continually improve, but then I look at all the things we still need to do . . .
Who knows?
We’ve spent a lot of time planning a kitchen renovation, and we followed that up with pricing a kitchen renovation. We are not doing a kitchen renovation this year. It’s just outside our price range, and we need to be able to save up some money to get it done all in one fell swoop. (I estimate it will be in the $25,000-$30,000 range, and that’s if we’re lucky . . .)
Perhaps the smart thing to do would be to do nothing on the house and save all that money toward that kitchen. However, there are some things we feel must be completed, just for the sake of our sanity and the overall look of our house:
The front steps–Two years ago, we ripped down the front porch and put in cement steps, with the plan of topping them off with granite treads and adding a wrought-iron railing. Then we got sidetracked last year by putting in our screen porch/shed combination, and the stairs never got completed. That needs to change, just because it’s good to finish projects, not just start them. Also, the front of the house needs serious help, and those steps are a part of that.The sun porch–Again, this is a project that was started last year when we ripped out the old sun porch, put in new windows and a ton of insulation . . . and then stopped before the outside was complete. (The inside will wait to be done as part of the kitchen renovation.) So right now we have the front of our house basically naked, with no clapboard or covering at all. Yuck. We’re going to put in clapboards and stone to complete it and tie it all together with the rest of the house.The wood shed–Many moons ago, we put in a wood shed behind our house. In the winters, we’d attach plywood to the sides of it to keep the snow out. The last few years, we just left the plywood up the whole year. It looks . . . very not good. So we’re going to switch that so that the whole thing looks more complete and intentional, and much less ply-woody.The front bay windows–The trim is in bad need of repair. No big renovation here. Just getting it back in good working order. We’ll likely also need to hire someone to come paint the whole thing, because my personal desire to paint things is much, much less than it was in previous years.Landscaping–With all of that done, and the front porch torn down, we have massive bare dirt piles as the first thing that greets people when they come to our house. That’s less than optimal. But with all these other smaller jobs completed, we can actually turn our attention to landscaping the front of the house and making it all look much more appealing.
The net effect of all of this won’t be that significant when it comes to how we live our lives day to day. However, it will generally make the house much more visually appealing, and there’s something to be said for that. The hope is to have the renovations complete within the next three weeks or so, and then find a painter to have that done soon after, so we can finish off the landscaping. May should be a busy month.
Wish us luck!
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 30, 2019
Sunday Talk: Now Is the Time
I was up in Lincoln on Sunday, where I gave the following talk. It ended up using my post on Notre Dame as a launching point to discuss broader issues, so don’t turn away just because you’ve read the first bit already. I think it turned out quite well. One of my better talks; they don’t all come together as nicely as this one did.
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About 13 years ago, Denisa woke me up from a nap. Her face was white. Shocked. “The Cabin burned down,” she told me. I had no way to really process what she was saying. Ever since I could remember, my family had a cabin up in the Wasatch Mountains in Utah. It was very much a communal affair. It belonged to my grandparents, and the entire family would head there en masse for holidays and vacations. Growing up, some of my happiest memories are spending a week each summer with my cousins up at that cabin, watching movies, playing games, going fishing, and just having a blast.
When I was in college, I was only about an hour away from the cabin. (Much closer than I’d been when I lived in Pennsylvania.) Denisa and I would go up regularly, but again it was almost always with family. My grandparents. My cousins. My aunts and uncles. Going to the Cabin on your own just felt . . . wrong. Like an amusement park where none of the rides are running. Year after year, the Cabin never really changed. It had always been there, and it always would be.
Until it wasn’t.
We never figured out exactly what happened. The nearest guess is my grandfather had left some rags in a bucket on the front porch. He’d been applying some stain with them, and he left them outside when he drove off. They must have spontaneously combusted in the sunlight. That initial fire caught the stairs on fire, and the cabin, being a cabin, was quickly engulfed. It was all gone. The film collection. The family pictures. The embodiment of all those years of fun.
I still sometimes think about it. Think about what it would have been like if I’d been there when those rags combusted. How big of a window did we have to stop the fire from happening? I think about the different rooms and things inside them that I loved, each of them burning, one after another. It’s incredibly sad to me. Yes, we rebuilt the Cabin, and when we did we said we’d make it “even better than before.” It’s a beautiful new building, but it’ll never be better than the original for me. The original was my childhood. It was Star Wars: A New Hope. The new one is the prequels. (Well, maybe it’s Rogue One. Let’s not get carried away here.)
It’s probably natural that one of my first thoughts when I watched Notre Dame burn on television was of the Cabin and all those nightmares around it. I’d been to Notre Dame twice, once in high school on a marching band trip, and once a few years ago with my family. I’m a bit of a cathedral junkie. Any city I go to in Europe, I have to seek them out, just to appreciate the sort of effort and craft that went into them. Seeing the aftermath is heartbreaking, though I’m so glad the entire building wasn’t lost. Hearing Macron say they’ll rebuild it “better than ever” definitely reminds me of my family’s goals after the fire, along with the inevitable conclusion that it can’t be better than the original, because the original was the original. There’s no need to be “better,” though we say it to try and comfort ourselves. To feel like there wasn’t a loss. That we’ll make things right again.
Even though we can’t.
When a loss happens in our life, whether it’s something physical like a building or emotional like a friendship, that loss leaves marks on us. The bigger the loss, the bigger the marks. It doesn’t mean we’ll never be happy again, or things won’t ever be right, but it does mean they’ll always be different. I think it’s important to recognize that and to give yourself time to process it.
The other thing I was reminded of in those flames was watching the Twin Towers burn on 9/11. The comparison is inevitable for me, since that event had such an impact on me as well. Here I was again, watching footage of a place I knew. A world icon in flames.
I remember in the aftermath of 9/11, so many people didn’t know quite how to respond to it. I was certainly one of those people. It was too big for my mind to really wrap around it. I was in college at the time, and I went to classes the next day. The professor chose to use the event as a lecture topic. I’m sure he was trying to deal with it, just as I was, and perhaps his efforts helped some. All I know is that for me, they were the exact wrong approach. He was discussing the symbolism of the Twin Towers. Picking apart why the terrorists had chosen those buildings. What it all meant.
I went back to my apartment and dropped his class that afternoon. I had no desire right then to use that tragedy as a discussion topic. That was a city I knew and loved. A city I’d grown up with. I had friends who had been around the World Trade Center that day. Family members who were close enough that I was worried if they were okay, and relieved to find out they were. I can talk about the events now, of course. I’ve had the time I needed to process it all. But I still remember the anger I felt sitting in class that day as the professor blithely used all of what had happened as a way to discuss something so trivial (to me that day) as Flaneur literature.
In the aftermath of Notre Dame, I’ve seen some of the same things happening. I saw articles written just hours later talking about how we all could use that loss to understand other things more acutely. How we were supposed to feel or think or cope. I couldn’t bring myself to read those articles, because to me, it would be as if Denisa had woken me from my nap that day thirteen years ago and said, “The Cabin burned down. We need to remember how much it inspired us, and how its loss will bring us to new heights in the future.”
When I encounter loss, I don’t need explanation or justification. I need time to let myself be sad. I don’t need people telling me “Cathedrals have burned down before” or “It was only a building” or “It could have been so much worse” or “There are so many other things in the world to be sad about.” I need people to be quiet. There will be time for all that self-reflection and philosophy later. But it’s okay to be sad for a while. To feel for what’s gone. To recognize that things will never be the same.
A tree grows organically. It encounters trials throughout its life. Wind storms. Ice storms. High winds. They affect what the tree looks like. How it twists and what limbs thrive. At the end of all those storms, it still looks like a tree, but it’s a different tree than it would have been without the storms. It might be stronger. It might be weaker. But it’s inevitably different.
This is all a prelude to set the stage that explains how I felt when I read the assigned topic for this month’s high council talks. Elder Jack N. Gerard spoke last October of the importance of doing important things now. Not tomorrow or the day after.
If someone comes back from Paris, there’s a few touristy things you’re almost required by law to do. I think toward the top of everyone’s list would be going up the Eiffel Tower and going to Notre Dame. They’re two of the activities I did on my first trip to Paris, back in high school. And when Denisa and I took our family to the city about five years ago, we went all over the place. We saw the Louvre. We strolled through the city. We went to outdoor parks and palaces. But while we visited the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, we never went up, and we never went in.
In hindsight, these seems like a serious mistake, especially in light of the fact that the cathedral will never be able to be visited the same way again. And now that it’s been a while since the trip, I find myself wondering why in the world we would have traveled halfway around the world, only to stop just shy of actually experiencing everything we’d planned on seeing. As I’ve reflected on this and talked it over with Denisa, I came up with a few reasons.
First off, we were very busy. I know that seems like a silly excuse now, but I’m not kidding when I say we were really going at breakneck speed through the city those three days. We had so much we wanted to do and see, we never thought about prioritizing for the things we assumed we’d do no matter what. If you ask New Yorkers to raise their hand if they’ve been to the Statue of Liberty, chances are a slew of people will keep their hands down. Why don’t people go to see the iconic landmarks right in their backyards? I think a lot of it is for the same reason. You always just sort of assume you’ll get around to it, and so you let other things bump it down the priority list. It’s not that we didn’t visit either the tower or the cathedral, but in both cases when we went, the lines were long. Longer than we decided at the time was worth trying to fight with three tired kids.
But I can’t pass it all off on being unlucky with line length. You’re able to reserve a spot at the Eiffel Tower months in advance. I forgot to do it ahead of time, assuming there would be plenty of spots open when we walked up to it. There weren’t. And our apartment was literally less than a hundred yards from the cathedral. We passed by it many times when there were lines that weren’t too bad. But we just kept bumping it back until the last minute, and by then of course it was too late.
Separated from the actual trip now by time and space, it’s easy for me to look at it all and break it down into fundamentals. We’d traveled halfway across the world and spent thousands of dollars to get our family to the city in the first place. What was another half hour of waiting in line and whatever donation it would have cost to visit the cathedral? We’d done everything, but we’d stopped just short of the desired goal, letting ourselves get distracted by other interests.
In my spare time, I write novels. I’m three quarters of the way through the first draft of my eighteenth right now. But I didn’t learn how to write a book all at once. One of the first steps in my writing career happened in high school, when I was introduced to the five paragraph essay.
It’s not an earth shattering concept. When you’re given a writing prompt, you use a pre-specified format to answer it. Five paragraphs. One for an introduction, where you briefly mention three arguments you’re going to use to prove your point. Then you have one paragraph per argument (given in the same order you first introduced them), and you finish everything off with a final paragraph devoted to a conclusion.
There’s a lot to be learned from that basic formula. First and foremost is the importance of being able to have a single goal and break that goal into smaller pieces, all related to that same goal. The introduction of your essay lays out the roadmap you’re going to follow to reach your final destination: proving your argument. But at no point in time does any one of those smaller goals supplant your overarching objective.
I see this principle at work in my life all the time. For example, I work at the University of Maine at Farmington. Students head to college for a variety of reasons. For some, it seems to be an extension of high school, simply the next step in the “things everybody does” roadmap of life. And so they spend their time “going to college.” Playing games. Sleeping through classes. The only real objective is to eventually be able to graduate, and some even begin to select coursework and majors to make that goal simpler. But if all you do is get a degree without a plan for how to apply that degree, then you’ve only saddled yourself with mounds of debt.
The ones who tend to succeed in life are the ones who remember college is only a means to an end. You go to college because you want to get a job. That goal might be because you want to support a family, be financially independent, or you just have always dreamed of becoming a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. All of those are excellent goals, but you have to remember that graduating from college is just a step along the way to those goals. It’s a paragraph supporting your thesis.
I’ve been using a lot of writing and education analogies, so let me switch things up to try and connect to some of the rest of you. In sports, teams have an overarching goal: win the Superbowl or the World Series. In order to achieve that goal, several steps have to be met along the way. Individual games are important, but not the only important thing. Often a team will hold back its best players or spell them out because they realize that short term benefits can come at the expense of those long term goals.
In the Book of Mormon, Lehi’s family had a goal when they left Jerusalem. They wanted to be protected and to live a happy life. But there were some significant challenges to that goal. Jerusalem is in the middle of a largely barren wilderness, full of dangers and an environment inhospitable to life. To help them navigate that wilderness, they were given the Liahona, a “round ball of curious workmanship” that directed them which way to go in their journeys. It worked as long as Lehi’s family was righteous, and stopped working when they weren’t. But it would have been a mistake for the family if they ever started simply focusing on getting the Liahona to work, like trying to keep a television in working order, but never watching any programs on it.
Elder Gerard said, “We live in a world of information overload, dominated by ever-increasing distractions that make it more and more difficult to sort through the commotion of this life and focus on things of eternal worth. Our daily lives are bombarded with attention-grabbing headlines, served up by rapidly changing technologies. Unless we take the time to reflect, we may not realize the impact of this fast-paced environment on our daily lives and the choices we make. We may find our lives consumed with bursts of information packaged in memes, videos, and glaring headlines. Although interesting and entertaining, most of these have little to do with our eternal progress, and yet they shape the way we view our mortal experience.”
Satan would like nothing more than for us to lose sight of the overarching goal we each should have: obtaining eternal life. And to get us to forget that goal, he’ll try just about anything. One of his best substitutions is to get us to focus all our efforts on a sub goal instead of the main goal. To focus on the college, not the career. The single game, not the Superbowl. The Liahona, not the destination. When it’s phrased like that, you might think it’s preposterous. Who would do something like that when it comes to eternal life? This isn’t just visiting Notre Dame. It’s my salvation on the line.
And yet I have to fight against it all the time. Case in point. I have a job. It’s vital to the success of my family. We need money to be able to have a place to stay, food to eat, and clothes to wear. But sometimes it’s too tempting to let the needs of my job overpower the needs of my family. To become so focused on doing the things my employer wants me to get done that it all comes at the expense of the reason I’m working in the first place. This isn’t to say there aren’t times that you have to bear down and get a bunch of extra work done in order to meet deadlines, but rather that it’s important to remember that job is a means to the end, and not the end itself.
Another example. One of the reasons Denisa and I got married was to have a family. But we’ve both tried very hard to keep the focus of our marriage centered on each other without shifting that focus solely to our children. Why? Because I don’t want there to come a day when my last child moves out of the house and I look at this woman I’m married to and wonder why in the world we’re still together, now that the kids are gone. We share a common goal for now of raising our three children and launching them off into the world to lead successful lives of their own, but that’s still just a single paragraph in the overarching essay that is our marriage. It doesn’t trump our relationship to each other, nor should it.
An example from church: it can be so easy sometimes to slip into a mindset where the current calling we have is the most important calling in the church. Where everything else exists to make sure that our calling can prosper, whether that’s being the Scout leader, Primary President, or Elders Quroum President. Activities run by those callings take on extra meaning. After all, “Adam fell that men might be, and men are, that they might have a successful ward barbecue.”
I love how much church leaders have been emphasizing a shift to a home-centered church. A reminder that much of the structure of the church exists to help strengthen families and help families help each other come closer to Christ. We should remind ourselves that church activities are there to support the thesis of a strong family. Some people will use those activities to meet that goal. Some won’t. And that’s okay.
Several years ago, President Oaks gave a talk he called “Good, Better, Best.” He referred to it again this past General Conference. In it, he said, “Just because something is good is not a sufficient reason for doing it. The number of good things we can do far exceeds the time available to accomplish them. Some things are better than good, and these are the things that should command priority attention in our lives.” He continued, “As we consider various choices, we should remember that it is not enough that something is good. Other choices are better, and still others are best. Even though a particular choice is more costly, its far greater value may make it the best choice of all.”
If you read the entirety of his talk, I think the message behind it is spot on. But I feel like often we end up remembering nothing more than that “Good, Better, Best” maxim, and sometimes, the “best” is the enemy of the “good.” In other words, in our effort to achieve nothing but the best, we can end up getting nothing done at all. For example, my wife is one of the best cleaners I know. If there’s a messy room somewhere in the world, and you want that room to be cleaned thoroughly to the point that it’s spotless, then I would put Denisa in charge of the operations. She finds areas of a room that are still dirty that my brain can’t even comprehend. If you want the best cleaning job you can get, turn to her.
There are many times that I have no chance of cleaning my house to Denisa standards, and it’s easy at times to feel like since I can’t clean it the best I could clean it, I might as well not even bother cleaning it at all. The same phenomenon happens when I’m writing. I’ll be trying to make my way through a chapter, and my internal editor will sit there taking pot shots at everything I’ve written, pointing out the flaws and the weaknesses. It’s tempting to just stop writing altogether, or to stop myself from moving forward to instead work on crafting the best sentences I can, each and every time.
Experience has taught me, however, that if I focus on just writing the best sentences, I never actually finish a book. Not a good book, not a better book, and certainly not the best book. I’ve also learned that telling Denisa I didn’t clean the house at all because I knew I didn’t have time to clean it to her standard isn’t going to get me far in the “Husband excuses” department.
I think most people can recognize my mistakes in those specific examples, but I worry we lose sight of that principle in our discussion of “good/better/best” decisions in our life. The problem is we each have this ideal person in our head. The person who goes through life only ever making the best decisions, and those best decisions are always straightforward. They spend their time making dinner for the needy, visiting the sick, doing service for their neighbors, keeping their house in perfect order, providing for all their family’s needs, becoming well-rounded individuals, and always making award winning meals that are the envy of the town.
But that ideal person in our head has none of the problems and challenges we face every day. He doesn’t get tired or over stressed. She doesn’t wake up with a full slate of obligations: errands to run, kids to help with school work, and church callings to fulfill. That ideal person faces a series of completely isolated decisions and can ask themself what the best choice is in each of those instances. And then we compare each of our much more complicated decisions with those ideals. Is it any wonder we find ourselves continually wanting?
Sometimes the best decision is to sit at home and watch Netflix. Sometimes it’s to read your scriptures. The “best” decision is going to vary for each person and each situation. I don’t mean for this talk to feel like it’s an overwhelming challenge, just as I don’t believe God wants us to feel like there’s no hope for us to ever do everything right.
President Nelson taught, “If we are to have any hope of sifting through the myriad of voices and the philosophies of men that attack truth, we must learn to receive revelation.” We must learn to rely on the Spirit of Truth, which “the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him.” And we need to recognize that revelation can and will tell different people to do different things in similar situations. Sometimes it doesn’t always make sense, but someone else’s directions don’t need to make sense to us. They’re not for us.
As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now. I can’t go back to Notre Dame. I can’t go back to my family’s Cabin. Not the way they were. But I can choose to try to avoid those situations in the future. On this past trip to visit my wife’s family in Europe, we took the kids to Krakow. And one evening, we went for a walk through the city, enjoying the nightlife and the ambiance of an Eastern European city in the dark. Toward the end of it, I pulled the kids over to the side of the main square and told them to stand there and just appreciate it. Really live in the moment. Acknowledge it for what it is.
It’s a mental trick I’ve used in other situations as well. Sometimes when I’m feeling overwhelmed by a busy household full of kids and all the duties that go along with them, I try to picture myself in the future, looking back at this time in my life. I pretend I’m able to let that future me time travel back to where I am now. Believe it or not, that typically helps me appreciate what I have in the present and cope with it all quite a bit better.
May we all strive to find out what God would have us focus on, and then put all our efforts on following through with those goals. I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
April 29, 2019
A Spoileriffic Avengers Endgame Review
In case you didn’t see the title, this review about the Avengers Endgame will contain spoilers. The comments are also open season on spoilers. If you don’t want spoilers, don’t read this review.
Why am I posting spoilers in the review? A couple of reasons. First, I’ve reviewed enough of these Marvel movies that my opinion about them really hasn’t altered much. I like them. They’re the same recipe, for the most part, repeated, and for now that’s fine with me. (See my review of Captain Marvel as the latest example.) So I don’t know of a way to write an interesting response to this current movie without actually getting into the weeds about the movie itself.
Also, it made like over $1.2 billion in the first weekend, leading me to assume that many many of my friends have already seen the movie. So . . . why not really talk about it, instead of dancing around spoilers?
Anyway. I’ve written enough between my warning about SPOILERS and my actual review now that I feel like I can get into the movie. Ready?
I had a blast at the film. Seeing a big movie opening night with a slew of fans is totally the best way to watch a spectacle movie like this. Everyone’s into it. There are cheers. Applause. Gasps. Sobs. It all adds up to a better experience, as I’ve said before. The first movie felt like only half a movie, because it was. It ended on a huge down note. And yes, so did this one, but there was no getting around it, in my book. Characters had to die and stay dead. There needed to be some lasting impact on the Marvelverse.
I was talking to a friend before the movie, and he expressed how little tension he ever felt in a Marvel movie, since none of the characters ever really dies. They might “die,” but then they come back from that certain defeat, stronger than ever. Having Tony die made total sense. Captain America’s “death” . . . I have some qualms about, mainly because it conflicts with the internal consistency of the film’s rules, but as soon as I start to want to talk about that, I remember I just watched a movie that has a talking raccoon and a talking tree in leading roles. So . . . perhaps the film can get away with a bit of fudging the facts.
Really, I just would have suggested Marvel kill off some characters and have them stay dead earlier in the series. I’m not sure that Guardians of the Galaxy was the right vehicle for it, but Groot could have stayed dead in that one. If you don’t leave characters dead, then people keep thinking you’re faking. Even when Tony was actually dying, I kept wondering if he’d just make a sly wink and then get better all of a sudden, and no one wants that to be happening in the middle of an audience’s mind when they’re going for real drama.
It’s a long movie, but it didn’t feel long to me. I loved how they went back to the other Marvel movies to revisit them from new angles. That was a lot of fun. (Though why Tony had to have Antman suggest this to him is a bit beyond me, since Tony was able to solve it after about three hours of deep thought. You’d think he might have tried that a little earlier?)
As with all Marvel movies, it mixed humor and action well, giving us a variety of different types of actions, from guns to karate to magic users and more. (No one-note punchy powers ala DC.) True, they struggled with the power level at times. Captain Marvel shows up and completely blasts through Thanos’s entire ship in about three seconds. Straight through massive metal walls and foes alike. The whole thing blows up. Then she’s entrusted with a metal glove, and Spiderman’s skeptical she’s going to be able to cross a battlefield with it. No worries! Every female Marvel movie has gathered together to help her out. (That felt way to heavy handed . . . until I talked to my daughter after the movie, and she said how it was her favorite part. That’s when I remembered we’re not all hardened movie critics. and Marvel movies aren’t fine cinema. It’s okay to lean a bit heavier on the keyboard when you’re writing some of the scenes, I think.)
In any case, I got more than enough entertainment for my $6. (My condolences, all you people who have to pay ridiculous sums to see movie premiers. I love my town’s local cinema.) I’m very interested to see where Marvel goes next, though I’m skeptical it’ll be anywhere significantly different than where they’ve been before.
I ended up giving the movie a 10/10, despite all the flaws I just listed. I gave it a 10 out of respect to the 22 film arc as a whole. To everything Marvel has done for superheroes, and to the place this movie now holds in the grand scheme of things. I gave a 10 to the amount of enjoyment I’ve derived from all of it over the years. A 10 because it’s a super hero movie, for crying out loud, and it’s one of the best super hero movies I’ve seen, capturing not the gritty rawness of some of the “better” super hero movies (like Dark Knight), but rather the awesomesauce I loved reading and hearing about when I was reading comics growing up.
So . . . that’s what I thought. What did you think?
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 26, 2019
A Boy and His Cellphone
For the past five years or more, Tomas has wanted a cellphone. Denisa and I have fought against this constant desire, shoulder to shoulder, like a couple of Gandalfs standing off against the Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm. (And if you think I’m a huge geek to use that reference, consider this: I didn’t even have to look up how to spell it the right way. Mic. Drop.)
There have been many reasons to avoid getting our son a phone. The expense. The constant distraction. The potential for cyber-bullying. The inability for young people to make good choices when they have a video camera everywhere they go. And we’d trot those reasons out year after year whenever the request would come up again.
Until his fifteenth birthday.
What made us change our mind? What flaming whip snaked up from out of the darkness to coil around our ankles and send us tumbling into the unknown abyss below? (Too much?)
A school trip.
When Tomas headed off on his Fiddlers trip to Boston for almost a week, we decided we wanted to have a way to contact him easily. So we sent him with Denisa’s phone. And that worked for the most part (even though, perhaps, he wasn’t quite as communicative as we’d imagined he might be), but it had the surprising consequence of Denisa not being able to have her phone for almost a week. And despite occasional claims to the contrary, it turns out Denisa actually uses her phone quite regularly throughout the day.
So that really wasn’t an option going forward.
At the same time Tomas proved on that trip that he was capable of looking after the phone. And we looked at our finances and decided perhaps we did have the money to afford getting him a line of his own. (Family plans that reduce the per month rate certainly help. And so he’s now the proud owner of an iPhone 6S. (Which you can get for $5/month with a 24 month commitment.) We naturally cautioned him about all the myriad ways he might lose his phone privileges, all of which he readily agreed to.
And just like that, the battle was over.
Until DC looked at us and asked when she could get a phone. Thankfully, now we have the Power of Precent on our side. Nothing says “justice” like kids recognizing that “if I had to wait for it, you do too.” Tomas was 15 before he got a phone. When DC is 15, he’ll be off on his mission, and we can divert those phone payments to the next kid.
But I’ll worry about that somewhere down the road . . .
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 25, 2019
More Thoughts on Marriage
If you haven’t already seen on Facebook, today Denisa and I celebrate 18 years of marriage. I’ve written on this topic before (probably every year since I’ve been blogging, I imagine, but I don’t have time to go looking for the posts), but I had some thoughts on it this year that I thought I’d jot down. They might overlap what I’ve said before, or they might not. (The advantage of not going to look to see what I’ve already said . . . )
To me, a marriage is a living thing. It can grow and flourish, and it can die, and it can do pretty much everything in between. It changes the people who are in it in ways that are unavoidable. I find myself unable to really give any opinion on anyone’s marriage but mine. There’s the front you present to the world, and there’s what happens when you’re at home. Even in a good marriage, those two fronts will be different, I think. Maybe not drastically different, but different nonetheless, in much the same way as any family relationship has multiple layers.
But that’s the thing with a marriage. You take a person who’s not your family at all, and you make that person the closest family member you will ever have, potentially. (It depends on how close you let that person become, I suppose.) In every other family relationship (barring step-families, which are a beast by themselves), you grow into the connections. Families understand the dynamics they operate by, because they’ve all been operating by them for as long as that family existed.
Not with a spouse. The two of you come from entirely different backgrounds, no matter how much you might think you don’t. The unspoken assumptions your family took for granted are completely different from her unspoken assumptions, but there’s no way of really knowing or communicating what those assumptions are, because they’re just a part of what you’ve always assumed is The Way Things Are. It would be like having a conversation about what air tastes like. However, as you live your lives together, those assumptions worm their way to the surface, like hidden boulders in a garden. You have to navigate around their appearance one way or another if you want anything to grow.
Denisa has definitely seen me at my best and my worst over the years, and I can say the same for her. The fact that we’re still close and still together says as much about each other as it does about us individually. When you can look at a person and know their strengths and flaws and love them not in spite of them but because of them, that’s a good sign that things are in a healthy spot.
How are we celebrating 18 years together? I’m taking Tomas and DC to go see Avengers: End Game. How can I get away with doing this? Because Denisa and I understand each other pretty completely, for one thing, so I’m not really worried she’s got this hidden agenda of Things My Husband Must Do to Prove He Still Loves Me, and (probably more importantly) I show her I still love her by doing all the little things that make a marriage work. By managing finances. By picking DC up from school today. By heading home to discuss how we want to landscape the front yard.
Also by going out on a date with her tomorrow, because I’m not a complete imbecile.
As I said before, marriage changes both of you. Life changes both of you. When I look back at who we were 18 years ago, I’m not entirely sure how well we would get along with that couple if we headed out on a double date with them tonight. We were much more conservative then. Much younger and confident we knew what was right and what wasn’t. That’s okay. I didn’t get in this game to never change. I’d like to think we’ve improved each other over the years, not by force or by persuasion (most of the time), but just by constant example. Marriage changes are more like erosion than earthquakes. Earthquake changes break you apart, after all. Erosion molds you over time.
Marriage is one of the scariest jumps into the unknown I can think of, and it only gets more frightening when you realize all the implications that initial jump entailed. Thank goodness I didn’t, since I was already scared enough of marriage as it was. But it’s still hands down the best decision I ever made. I can’t believe it’s been 18 years already.
Happy anniversary, Denisa!
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 24, 2019
Patreon Reminder
Hi everybody! Checking in with a reminder of my lovely Patreon page, and a shoutout to all of my current Patrons. (The few. The proud.) If you don’t know what Patreon is, it’s a website for content creators to put stuff up for their fans, who in turn support them by chipping in a tip or so a month. I’ve kept my page very simple and inexpensive. There are three tiers of support you can give me. At each level, you set it up once and Patreon charges you once a month from then on out. Set it and forget it.
The first support level is $1/month. You have my heartfelt thanks and (I assume) the thanks of all my other readers, seeing as how your support makes the blog possible. You’ll also get a free copy of Cavern of Babel (in pdf format). In addition, you get the right to sponsor one blog post a month. That means you get to give me a blog prompt (topic or something to review) and I’ll respond on the blog. There’s a forum on the message boards to do this.Join $1 Tier
The second support level is $2/month. You’ll get to read two chapters a month of an unpublished book by yours truly. The entirety of ICHABOD is already posted and waiting for you as soon as you sign up at this level. You could even sign up, read the book, and then cancel if you wanted, since all level two content is available to you as soon as you subscribe. I’m currently posting the entirety of another book of mine (PAWN OF THE DEAD) next. These chapters will be posted the first and third Friday every month.
In addition, all current First Class Woodchucks will get their names in the acknowledgements page of each book I publish. Your name, in print. (And to think your mother-in-law said you’d never amount to much!)Join $2 Tier
Finally, the third support level is $3/month. In addition to getting all the perks of the other levels, folks at this level will get to read one chapter of one of my current works in progress each month. (Talk about exclusive!) This chapter will be posted the second Friday every month. Join $3 Tier
As always, my original core group of Patreons can get any of these perks by just dropping me a line. Because they’re awesome like that.
In any case, if you’d like to support me, my writing, and this blog, this is the easiest way to do it, aside from buying my books. And if you can’t afford to do it, you could share this post with others, write reviews of my books, and tell other people they’re great. Thanks for all the help and support you’ve given me over the years. I appreciate it!
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
April 23, 2019
Level Fifteen Father
It’s Tomas’s birthday today. The big 1-5. And I’ve written plenty of things about him over the years. He’s at the point now where I think I won’t write so much about him, simply because he’s got friends and acquaintances who might read those things, and I tend to try to avoid writing about specific people without their permission. (It’s easier to write in generalities, but it’s hard for me to protect the identity of the person in question when it comes to writing about my children.)
However, one thing that I’ve been thinking about a fair bit today is the fact that the birthday of your oldest child is also the also the anniversary of the day you became a parent. And as I posted a while back, I like to think of anniversary points as “level up” spots instead of “one year older” points in my life. Because who doesn’t want to level up? And that’s pretty much what getting older is. Gaining experience over time.
So that means I’m now a level fifteen parent, which feels about right to me. This is not my first rodeo by any stretch, and
Is there a difference between a level fifteen father and a level fifteen mother? In my family there certainly is. To keep the RPG theme going, it’s mainly because Denisa and I have specialized in different things as we’ve leveled up over the years. She’s devoted a lot of ability points to “home management,” “nurturing,” and (most recently) “car transportation.” I’ve dumped my ability points into “chore coordination,” “consequence enforcement” and “finance management.” I don’t believe those specializations are assigned based on gender, but they’re definitely specializations parents need to worry about, regardless of how they divvy them out. And there have been occasions when we’ve had to swap duties over the years, so I’m probably around a level 2 nurturer and a level 1 car transporter, but specialization definitely helps in the long run.
As a level fifteen parent, there are still areas that I have no experience with at all. Tomas often ends up bearing the brunt of that. When DC and MC reach middle school, for example, they’ll benefit from having parents who already have experience navigating through at least some of the pitfalls that might crop up there. Though as with any campaign, each one ends up differently, and it’s not like we’ll be prepared for all possibilities.
It’s for those new challenges that I turn to more advanced level parents than I. Thankfully, I’ve got friends who are level 25 and higher, and family who are level 45 right on up to over level 60. True, sometimes the higher level parents aren’t quite as able to deal with the same problems of lower level parents, just because it’s been so long since they had to handle level 15 problems, and some of those level 15 problems have changed in the intervening 45 years since they were a level 15.
When I think back on the person I was fifteen years ago and everything that person has gone through since, it’s remarkable. You don’t get a crash course as a parent, which is too bad, since there’s so many different aspects of parenting you end up just fumbling through as best as you can.
Anyway. Not much more profound to offer you today. Just that thought, and the chance to wish Tomas another happy birthday.
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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.
If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.
