Bryce Moore's Blog, page 93
March 17, 2020
Being Creative in Times of Stress
I’ll be honest, folks. It’s been very difficult for me to find the will to create things over the last week or so, and I don’t necessarily see anything changing over the next while. On the one hand, this should be a great environment for me to crank out the words. All of my evenings have magically freed up. The kids have absolutely nothing going on. There’s no need to drive anyone anywhere. I don’t even drive to church each week anymore.
But creative writing is something that I have a hard time forcing. I try to treat it like a regular job: 1,000 words a day, six days a week. And so maybe that explains some of why it’s been so hard for me the past bit. I’m struggling at work, too. I sit down to get a task done, and I just sort of spin my wheels. It’s not that I’m doing something else instead. I’m not even slacking off effectively.
Instead, I find myself stopping in the middle of a thought multiple times. Staring for long periods of time at the screen. Wondering all sorts of wonders about what’s going to happen.
It’s not that I personally am afraid. I’m not afraid for myself, Denisa, or my kids. All the research I’ve done (and it’s been a lot: no lack of motivation there) indicates people who are relatively young generally get through this disease without problems. Half of the young people who get it don’t even realize they had it to begin with. But there are other impacts than the ones to my health.
For one thing, I’ve got family and friends who are older or already at risk. I read about how fast this spreads, and how many people will end up getting it, and it doesn’t take very difficult math to figure out some people I know and care for are going to be affected by it. It’s likely people I know will die. And that’s just sitting there, hovering in the air above me like some sort of ominous horror movie music. It’s not a pleasant thought to dwell on, so I try to ignore it.
But there are so many other things to worry about.
How long will this last?How will my kids be handling learning?What will this do to their grades?What about the economy?Will my Disney trip be affected?What about my Aruba trip?
I could go on listing worries, but it’s already stressing me out. Some of those worries are very trivial. Some are potentially very serious. And I’m the sort of person who has a hard time separating the trivial from the serious, when it comes to worrying. (Seriously. It’s one reason why I put trivial things on my To Do lists. I view crossing each item off as being of equal importance. Crossing off “write journal” brings me close to the same satisfaction as crossing off “finish taxes.” I know it’s stupid, but there you have it.)
So when I’ve got all those other worries kicking around in my head, it’s difficult for me to set them aside and do something else. Anything else. So much of my writing is focused on thinking about “What if?” Right now, the majority of my brain is focused on much more serious “What ifs.” The typical ways I like to destress aren’t destressing me the way they usually do. Watching movies? Playing games? Reading? It’s just hard for me to escape that ominous horror movie music.
So how am I handling it? The same way I’m handling the rest of my life right now, of course. Pushing through it. I’m not saying I’m not doing the creative writing. But I am saying it’s much more difficult, just like everything else. And my thought is by sharing my personal experience with it, maybe it will help some of you feel less alone in the whole “living your life” effort right now.
Maybe it would make more sense to just give myself a few weeks’ vacation. But I don’t really think I’d be feeling that vacated. I’d rather get things done. Feel accomplished. Even if it takes a whole lot more personal effort to get there.
How are you handling things?
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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.
March 16, 2020
To All the Toilet Paper I’ve Used Before
I can’t even right now, so instead of writing another long post that says exactly how I feel at the moment, I decided to write about something much more important on a global scale.
We’re talking about toilet paper, people.
Late last week, Denisa and I realized we’d fallen victim to one of the current blunders of the modern world. We’d assumed we had more toilet paper on hand than we actually did. When the truth came to light, I scrambled frantically through the house, counting up how many rolls we had in stock. Six. A grand total of six rolls between me and using the bidet attachment we’d installed on our toilet back when we were using cloth diapers for MC. The world may be a grim place, but the thought of using a communal bidet (even just among family members) was enough to make me start eyeing the trees outside to see what leaves might still be salvageable. (“Sure, that one looks pretty brittle, but I’ll bet it’ll get the job done . . .”)
Thankfully, after putting out The Call to a few friends, someone came across some toilet paper still on shelves in the store and bought us 24 rolls, putting me a much safer distance from that bidet attachment. (Breathe easy, friends.)
But that near miss made me reflect on the wonders of toilet paper, and how many varieties there really are out there. And that made me think what the world *really* needs is a post by yours truly discussing the finer nuances of TP, ranging from the very crude to the creme de la creme. I’ve been around the world a fair bit, so I’m going to rate my toilet paper experience to date in my life. (Hey. Don’t give me any guff. You’re in quarantine. Can you honestly tell me you’ve got something better to do?)
Let’s start at the bottom. (See what I did there?) The absolute worst toilet paper experience I have seen didn’t happen to me, but rather to an acquaintance. Camping. I’m sure you can already see where this is headed, but suffice it to say that I think we can all agree the worst potential toilet paper-like substance to use would be poison ivy. Sure, it might take care of the immediate need, but the aftermath of that experience would leave much to be desired. Just don’t do it.
Slightly above poison ivy, though, would be leaves in general. I’ve had to use them before, but let’s get specific here. When I was studying abroad in the Middle East, I went for a sunrise hike on Mt. Sinai. It sounds glorious, right? Hiking in the dark so you can be there at the top of the world when the sun comes up? And it was a pretty incredible experience, except for the fact that I got a bad case of diarrhea in the middle of the hike. And I had no toilet paper. I’ll stop there, but let’s just say that experience has permanently soured the concept of “just use leaves” for any bathroom experience. (Though some of that is due to the severe lack of any really big leaves on trees on Mt. Sinai. I’ve used leaves in other places in North America, and it’s been less than ideal, but still doable.)
(While I’m on the Middle East, I’ll mention Cairo, which gets a nod for a non-toilet paper experience. I was in the middle of the city and had to use the facilities, so I decided to go to the public bathroom. There was a little old lady standing outside the door offering to sell you toilet paper by the square. (Maybe a new side hustle in our post COVID-19 world?) I bought some, walked in, and discovered the public toilets were a series of holes in the ground. No walls. No toilets. No seats. Just holes and some well-worn foot prints on either side of each hole, indicating where to squat. Friends, it was at that moment that I realized I’m not nearly as ready to rough it as I thought I was. One glance at those holes, and my body decided that I probably wouldn’t need to go to the bathroom until I was out of the country.)
Moving on up the toilet paper pyramid, we come to the paper used by many in former East Germany. Or at least, the paper used by me as a missionary there. I was on a limited budget, and when I went to the store, I would inevitably buy the cheapest TP I could, because after all: it was just getting flushed once all was said and done. Why should I literally flush money down the toilet? Speaking from experience, cheap TP in Europe is just a few degrees above using sand paper to clean yourself up. Rough. Not soft. But ready to disintegrate at the most inopportune moments. Did that make me buy better toilet paper? No, but it made me use multiple sheets at the same time.
Next up would come the recycled toilet paper Denisa tried buying for the family a while ago. I’m all for saving the environment, but that day I discovered there was a line I wasn’t willing to cross. “Recreating my days in former East Germany toilets” was that line. We have since switched brands.
At this point, we leave behind (See? I did it again!) the truly uncomfortable TP experiences and move to the inconvenient. I think we can all agree that single-ply toilet paper is a less-than-user-friendly wiping experience. Yes, you can origami it together into a sort of multi-ply substitute, but you shouldn’t need to engage in a “Build Your Own Toilet Paper Adventure” to get such an essential task completed the right way. Plus, single ply has a tendency to betray you at all the wrong moments. When you need toilet paper, you need it to fulfill several basic functions. First, you’re looking for a degree of comfort. (Unless you’re a cheap missionary.) Second, it needs to keep itself together long enough to complete the task at hand. (I’m on a roll today, folks! I have ascended to the throne of puns here.) Third, you want that paper to vanish from the face of the earth as soon as your duty is done. (I’m going to stop noting the puns now, people. You can just play along at home.)
This leads me, ironically, to the next level. I’ve been to some bathrooms that have like triple or quadruple ply TP in stock. Scented stuff that probably costs as much as my children. And yes, I guess the experience is kind of like wiping with a pillow, but let’s be honest: do you really want to wipe with a pillow? Plus, that stuff is so thick, you could use it as a table cloth. And have you ever tried flushing a table cloth down the toilet? (Don’t answer that!) Top of the line TP has a tendency to clog the works. Sometimes better is anything but(t). (Sorry. Couldn’t resist. It just came out.)
So if it’s up to me, the best toilet paper for the job is just your average two ply, scent-free roll. In an ideal world, toilet paper blends into the background. You use it, and you don’t think about it. You don’t think it’s too soft or too hard or too thick or too thin. You just flush it away and move on with your life. If you come out of the bathroom with any sort of a story to tell about the toilet paper you used, trust me: no one wants to hear about it, and that toilet paper wasn’t doing its job right.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to 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.
March 12, 2020
Shellshocked
If you’re in Maine, you probably saw that yesterday the state university system abruptly changed course, going from “begin making plans for how classes might be held remotely” to “campuses will be closed starting next week.” (Next week is spring break, so they were already planned to be closed for that week.)
On the one hand, I definitely get it. Reducing social interactions before people can go on spring break and return with all sorts of germs is a safe move to make. And when I look at what’s happening in Italy, I definitely don’t want that here. If those are my two choices, I’ll take “close early” every day of the week.
But at the same time, I’m just sort of swimming in a sea of confusion. Granted, it’s better to be confused and healthy than confused and sick, but there are just so many questions up in the air right now that I’m having a hard time handling any of them. I do well in a crisis, I think, but this doesn’t even really feel like a crisis to me. It’s like this slow moving something-or-other, where it feels like I should both have the time I need to be able to make solid plans, and yet somehow don’t have any time at all to figure things out.
I think the root problem is the uncertainty. There are a slew of unknowns right now, and because the unknowns are a bit away from needing immediate answers, I have time to try and develop a plan for them. But because everyone knows those unknowns are coming, they all want answers now, before I’ve had time to make a plan.
And this isn’t just a work thing. It’s a church thing, as my church deals with canceling conferences and tweaking worship services. It’s a family thing, as each member of my family is affected in different ways. (Tomas had a robotics meet in MA that just got canceled. Denisa is scrambling to figure out how to teach all her classes remotely. We had a trip planned to Quebec this weekend that we’ve now canceled. What should we do about our trip to Aruba? It’s two months away. Is that long enough we don’t need to worry?) It’s a social thing, as the events I look forward to participating in each week are in limbo. It’s a travel thing, as some of my work trips have been canceled. It’s a logistical thing, as I try to figure out how to get refunded for those cancelations. It’s an economic thing, as I watch the stock market in shock and wonder what the repercussions will be.
So many different areas, and all of it compounded by the fact that no one can agree what the right course of action is. Some people think we’re all overreacting. Some people think we aren’t acting strongly enough. We’re in uncharted waters, we have no idea what the answers are, no idea what the “right” decision is, and we all have to muddle through as best as we can.
I’ve got an emergency academic meeting today to figure out university related issues. I’ve got an emergency religious meeting tonight to figure out are congregation issues. And all I really want is for all of it to never have happened in the first place.
I know what needs to happen, in theory. I know I just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other, figuring things out as I go, and being as understanding and helpful as I can be to everyone else, knowing that all of us are facing the same uncertainties. The same stresses. We’ll get through it, one way or the other, and hopefully by being simply inconvenient now, we can save ourselves from things that are tragic later on.
(Of course, if no tragedies materialize, then there will be some who wonder why we did what we did, and claim it was an overreaction. But then again, what if the overreaction is what made it so no tragedies materialized?)
But while I might know what needs to happen in theory, I’m still struggling to put my thoughts together in the here and now. I even tuned in to the President’s address last night, hoping somehow that would help. (It didn’t. Banning travel from Europe, as if that’s going to stop anything? It’s closing a door to keep out the mice, when you’ve already got a colony living in your crawlspace.)
So apologies in advance if I’m overly spacey right now. You cut me some slack, and I’ll cut you some slack, and hopefully we’ll all get through this together.
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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.
March 11, 2020
What I Forgot about Writing Groups
I’ve now had my second meeting of my new online writing group, and I can’t say enough about what a great experience it’s been. I thought I remembered the perks of being in a writing group, but that memory had gotten hazier than I’d realized over the years. What, exactly, has it done for me?
First of all, there’s the value of immediate feedback. Being able to hear from other authors about a specific bit of prose I’ve written highlights all sorts of things that I wouldn’t have noticed on my own. Some of this should have been obvious to me, but it wasn’t. (Because I forgot, and because I’m dense.) Everyone has their own worldview, and it’s difficult to look outside that view, because it defines who you are. In many ways, you can’t know you’re missing something, because you don’t even know there’s an area you might be missing.
When you’re writing a novel, you get very involved with the plot and the characters. Sometimes you don’t even realize there’s a huge glaring error on the page, because you’ve been working with it so long you no longer see it as an error. Having someone else read it, notice it, and then having a group of people confirm it in one fell swoop is lovely.
I also gain a lot by reading other people’s writing with an eye focused on what I liked, what I didn’t like, and why. That’s different from how I read most fiction. I consume it instead of reading it critically. (Why? Because I don’t enjoy it as much when I’m reading with a critical eye. And I read for enjoyment, most of the time.) In the conversations that follow a critique, I get to see how many evaluations stacked up against other people’s. That doesn’t mean I’m wrong or right, or that they are, but it gives me multiple data points to evaluate things on. That’s helpful.
Some things are very specific helps. The book I’m workshopping right now is SILVERADO (codename for now), the YA steampunk alternate history fantasy that I’ve been tinkering with for quite some time. I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how the world works and how the magic system operates, but that’s not something I typically handle. Most of my writing has been urban fantasy, where so many of the details are the same as the regular world. Only the magic has changed. In this book, the magic has permeated the entire society, so I was trying to play that out, even though I’ve never done it before.
One of my writing group members, however, writes epic fantasies. Fantasies that very much deal in sprawling worlds and magic systems. So to have him be able to look at how I’m introducing my world and magic system and give some pointers is invaluable. (Pro tip: I was introducing it all too fast.)
That same concept applies to tons of other things. My viewpoint character this time is a girl. I am not a girl. Someone in my writing group is. Do you think it might help to have a female perspective? (Duh.) I’ve never lived in San Francisco, where my book begins. Someone in my group has. Again: helpful.
And beyond all of that, just the experience of talking to other writers again is wonderful. Hearing how they deal with different challenges. Hearing what the word on the street is about different genres and agents and target audiences.
All. Helpful.
Worth some time out of my schedule? Undoubtedly. Here’s hoping it continues for months and years to come.
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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.
March 10, 2020
On the Coronavirus
Well, this is developing rapidly, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve been following along with (I assume) the rest of you, watching the COVID-19 makes its steady way from China to Asia to Europe to America and on and on. As I’ve watched that seemingly inevitable encroachment, I’ve managed to somehow simultaneously feel like we were blowing things out of proportion (toilet paper stockpiling) and foolishly ignoring serious warning signs (under testing). And I continue to have that feeling. On the one hand, yes: this isn’t some worst case scenario Ebola nightmare. The vast majority of people who get sick will get better. On the other hand, it spreads very quickly and can cause serious illness, which runs the risk of overwhelming our already strained medical system.
From what I’ve read, one of the best approaches to dealing with this bug is to quarantine populations. This isn’t necessarily to make it so no one gets the bug, but it does wonders for slowing its progress. A slow pandemic is much less threatening than a quick one. A pandemic where sick people have beds to stay in at hospitals, but where hospitals continue to have beds for all the other sick people they normally have. Things can spiral out of control quickly, and just because they haven’t done so here in America yet doesn’t mean they can’t.
And that isn’t even going near the economic impact this is having on the world and our country.
But still, all of that continued to be in the abstract. It wasn’t directly around me, so I didn’t have to seriously consider what I would do if this hit Maine. And then today at work we started to see talk of plans being made to figure out how we would handle a campus shutdown. Let me be clear: my university hasn’t decided to close its doors yet, but we’ve been asked to figure out what we would do if we had to go that route. Honestly, I think having a plan is a good idea, and I’m pretty red-faced that I haven’t been thinking about it prior to this.
I quickly discovered there’s a big difference between thinking about things in theory and thinking about the nuts and bolts of them in practice. How would we handle reserves? What about the building itself? Would we close the library? How do we handle reference help? What about conference travel? What do I do about conferences I’ve already registered for? What about airfare? Hotels?
It’s easy to think, “Quarantine! That solves the problem.” But boy howdy does the thought of actually quarantining leave me scrambling for “what about”s.
Have any of you had to face a quarantine about this already? How have you handled it? Inquiring minds want to know.
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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.
March 9, 2020
Daddy Daughter Dance: 2020 Edition
Another year, another Daddy Daughter Dance. This time around, MC was sick, so she was unable to come with Daniela and me. (She was pretty down about it until I reassured her that I’d take her out on a Daddy Daughter Date once she got better. That cheered her right up.)
Things have changed quite a bit since our first Daddy Daughter Dance back in . . . 2013. For one thing, Daniela is 5’9″ now, give or take. So when she and I were dancing, I didn’t have to look down hardly at all, which sounds great, until you remember the majority of the daughters at the dance were much, much shorter. Many of them were running around the floor as fast as they could, doing who-knew-what. I kept on forgetting to watch out for them, and there were some near misses several times. Thankfully, no one got trampled.
Daniela and I had a contest this time to see who recognized more songs. I was convinced from earlier years that they hardly played any songs I knew. Maybe it had been confirmation bias, though, because we ended this year tied 10-10. A lot of songs we both knew (What Does the Fox Say), some only I knew (Girls Just Wanna Have Fun), and some Daniela knew (I don’t know their names. Still.) We grabbed a glow stick for MC so that she didn’t feel too left out.
We went out to dinner with a group before, as is tradition. (Though the number of daddies has dwindled over the years as daughters grow up or they move away. We still had four of us this time, though, so it was a sizable group.) It was fun watching the others try to guess which grade Daniela was in. Most votes were for eighth grade, with some doubtful ninths and sevenths.
She’s in sixth.
We both ended up getting Mac and Cheese, which seemed somehow appropriate, since not too many years ago, Daniela would have been all over the mac and cheese. This time it was off the adult menu, however. Pretty tasty stuff. Daniela had hers with crunchy chicken, and I went with pulled pork.
I asked her if any of her friends were already dating. She said yes they were, though she didn’t understand why. “They’re only in sixth grade. Why bother?” A girl after my own heart.
Not sure how many more Daddy Daughter Dances I have in my future, but I would imagine quite a few. MC is only 6, after all. Maybe that gets me something like 8-10 to go? Though some of the older girls still like going for the pre-dinner, then cutting out before the dance. I can’t really blame them. The vast majority of the girls at the dance look like they’re under 10.
For now, I just enjoy having a tradition with my daughters to go do something fun. Even if the dance music was insanely loud. (Next year I might have to bring ear plugs . . . )
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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.
March 6, 2020
Planned Fun
When left to my own devices, I will typically do the same thing every day. I love a good routine, and a lot of routine days have to rack up before I start to wonder why I’m not doing something different. That said, I do eventually begin to wish I could do something different. It’s just I don’t wish for it hard enough to actually do something about it on the spur of the moment.
To get myself to do anything different, it typically takes making a plan ahead of time.
That’s why I’ve been focusing more on planning fun out well in advance to make sure that I actually take the time to relax when the time comes. For example, we hardly ever went to musicals or performances our first ten years or so here in Maine, despite the fact that Denisa and I really enjoy going to those sort of things. We’d go to Broadway shows, but we wouldn’t go to shows right in our backyard. We began to branch out a couple of years ago, trying to schedule things in advance. (Not always easy to do in Maine in the winter, when you never know if a blizzard is going to shut down your plans for the evening.)
However, if you buy tickets for 4 shows at the University of Maine in Orono, they’ll let you cancel those tickets up to two days in advance, and book tickets for a different show. Doing this let us plan to go to shows, but know that if the snow materialized, we could always change those plans. 4 shows just ensured we actually went to things more regularly.
I’m glad we’ve been doing it. So far this season we saw Bobby McFerrin, The Color Purple, and Finding Neverland. We’ll go to see An American in Paris in a month or so. The day of each show, I’m typically a little peeved at myself for scheduling something. There’s a speed bump of hesitation I always seem to have whenever I’m going to do something that involves “not sitting on my couch watching Netflix or reading.” But after we’ve gone, I’m always very glad we took the time to go out.
The same is true for the slew of vacations I’ve been planning ever since I started credit card churning. A lot of them are small trips to Boston or Bangor or New York City. Day trips that go by quickly. Some are bigger, like New Orleans or Washington DC or Aruba. But all of them are fairly inexpensive because of the hobby, and they get me to actually go and do things. Yes, I hate flying, but I’m willing to tolerate it, because I love seeing different places and experiencing different things. It also really helps to know something fun is on the horizon, even if I begin to wonder why I scheduled that fun the closer it gets.
What about you? Are you a spur of the moment sort of a person, or are you like me, and you need an actual ticket bought in advance to persuade you to go out there and do something different? (Or would you rather just stay at home and relax?)
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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.
March 5, 2020
I Wish BYU Would Stop Shooting Itself in the Foot
Contrary to popular belief, I actually prefer writing fluff pieces. Give me a good “top 10 favorite fruits” post any day of the week. Not because I mind writing on a weighty subject, but because it means there’s nothing weighty on my mind at the moment. Also, I never have to worry about the comments section on fluff pieces. (Except from those pesky apple connoisseurs . . .)
But late last night, I came across troubling news: BYU had (yet again) created a PR nightmare for itself and seriously upset and angered a good portion of its student body by bungling an Honor Code issue. If you weren’t following along at home, a bit ago BYU revised its Honor Code. As part of the revision, it deleted the section in it that dealt specifically with homosexual behavior. Students read it and were very confused. Was it now okay to have same-sex dating on campus, as long as no sex was involved? Many students asked the Honor Code office and were told “yes.”
(True, this is just what I hear second hand. I wasn’t involved in any of the actual discussions with the Honor Code office. All the school said publicly was that it would be dealt with on a case by case basis.)
There was much rejoicing from a significant chunk of the student body. (There was also much gnashing of teeth from another chunk.) What there wasn’t was clear discussion and explanation from BYU right from the get go. Either way, it made national headlines, and many students at BYU came out of the closet, since they now felt like they were free to do so without repercussions.
Then, yesterday, the school tweeted to say, “Just kidding.” True, it wasn’t quite that callous. (Though who handles important things like this through Twitter? Honestly? Is this what we’ve come to as a nation? Isn’t this the grownup equivalent of breaking up through someone on the phone, or with a letter? Apparently it also went out as an email, which is marginally better, but . . . ) What they actually did was explain that homosexual behavior (kissing, public displays of affection) can still get you in hot water, and then they gave a bunch of reasons that I suppose made sense to them at the time, but came across to yours truly as fairly tone deaf.
This, in turn, has caused all those students who were excited to now be crushed. Many are looking at transferring away from the university. Thousands are protesting. (And at BYU, that’s saying something.)
Let me be clear: I don’t speak for the Church. (Duh.) And I don’t pretend to receive revelation for everyone. How the Church and BYU decide to handle same-sex attraction is way beyond my pay grade. However, what can say is that the way this was handled was just plain awful. It was as if the administration didn’t realize deleting the whole “homosexual behavior” section of its Honor Code might catch the attention of other people. Like they were taken aback that they had to explain it at all, and so there they were fumbling for a response for weeks after the announcement, only to end up with this.
Speaking as a parent, one of the worst things I can do with my kids is to set false expectations. If I say I’m going to do something, I do it. They might think it’s not fair. They might think it’s stupid. But if I’m consistent in what I say and do, things are a lot less problematic.
This waffling back and forth around such a hot-button issue isn’t just tone deaf. It’s cruel. I’m not saying BYU was being cruel on purpose, but casual cruelty or indifferent cruelty is just as bad in many ways. And all of this was so avoidable. If they weren’t going to really change the policy, then they shouldn’t have edited the policy in a way that so easily could have been misinterpreted. If the policy was being misinterpreted, they should have clarified that right away. All of that should have been ready to go as soon as the first new Honor Code announcement was sent.
Instead, we have this mess . . .
I feel terribly for all the students affected. I’m saddened leadership keeps lurching from one bungled response to another. Why? Because I still believe in the religion and the school. They’re both definitely run on a day to day basis by humans, though. No doubt about that. Plenty of mistakes to identify. On a decade-to-decade level, they improve however. Let’s hope that improvement keeps coming.
At bare minimum, hopefully they get better at not actively making things worse for themselves and others.
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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.
March 4, 2020
Did I Change More, or Did the Republican Party?
A friend asked me to sum up my thoughts on being registered as a Republican after reading my post on the primaries yesterday. My initial reaction was short: “A remnant of an earlier Bryce and an earlier Republican Party. Feels like both the Party and I have each moved in different directions in the past decade. Hard for me to tell who moved more.” But I’ve continued to think about the question, and I decided it warranted a full post. (Even though that makes for two political posts in a row. Sorry.)
I was most definitely raised Republican. My family was Republican, and my church was (and continues to be) dominated by Republicans. When I was old enough to start actually paying attention to politics (around seventh or eighth grade, as I recall), I would listen to Rush Limbaugh and agree with pretty much everything he said. I even got his book, The Way Things Ought to Be. Of course, I also didn’t really know anything other than Republicanism. (That I was aware of, at least.) Back then, Democrats were all misguided or nefarious. (I did and said a lot of things back then that I still feel very sorry about to this day. Jokes I made. Casual comments I tossed off here and there, without even realizing just how hurtful they could be. I’m honestly surprised some of my high school friends are still friends with me, and I’m thankful they managed to overlook some of my more egregious character flaws back then.)
I went to school at BYU, in a Republican-dominated state, surrounded by a Republican-dominated student body. Ironically, that’s when I first began to start questioning the assumptions I’d made my entire life. Having grown up on the East coast, I had been surrounded by people who believed different things than I did and came from different backgrounds. True, I just recognized those differences in some areas, like religion and race, but I still saw that there were differences, and that those differences didn’t make those people better or worse than anyone else. I loved a lot of things about BYU (and continue to love it), but one thing I was never a fan of was how uniform the student body could be. I felt like so many people were cookie cutter twins, and I realized that some of the thoughts and opinions I had were different than what everyone else had. My views on religion, for example, were less by-the-book.
(It’s a simple example, but it serves to illustrate my point: at the time, the church’s stance on R-rated movies was “don’t see any of them.” I didn’t like that stance, and disagreed with it for a number of reasons I won’t go into here. But that disagreement definitely marked me as Other on BYU’s campus. Once you’ve been marked as Other, you begin to realize that Other isn’t the same thing as “Bad.”)
Then I went on my mission to Germany. For two years, I was talking and listening to people from all walks of life. I talked with former and current Communists. Former Nazis. I met current skinheads. I made friends with a ton of refugees from Ghana and Sierra Leone. And these weren’t casual conversations. I would go up to people and start talking religion. If there’s a way to find out what people really think about life, try talking to complete strangers about a real hot button topic, day in, day out, for two years. This didn’t cause me to lose my faith. (It actually strengthened it, as I began to question things and figure things out for myself, until I was a member of my religion not because I was raised that way, but because I honestly believed in it.)
In any case, I came home even more Other than I had left. I know it sounds strange to say that a straight, white, Latter-day Saint would feel Other when he was surrounded by other straight, white, Latter-day Saints, but I believe there are many different ways to be Other. Sometimes, when almost everyone is so similar, “Other” begins to be measured in much smaller gradations.
Still, I was staunchly Republican. I voted for George W, and I thought it was divine intervention that made it so that he won the election in 2000, especially after 9/11 happened. I felt like Bush led the country perfectly through that, and I didn’t understand why anyone could see it any other way.
In 2007, I moved to Maine. Still Republican, though with a streak of rebelliousness that anyone else would call mild-mannered, but which had continued to set me apart in Utah. In Maine, of course, I felt like an arch-conservative. Like that liberal streak in me was only there in comparison to other conservatives. (True.) I participated in the local caucus process, rubbing elbows with other staunch Republicans, and it was all fine and good. I had a Mitt Romney sign in my yard in 2008.
Then John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate.
I know it seems like such a silly thing to have such a big impact on me, politically speaking, but the more Sarah Palin spoke, the more disillusioned I became with her, and by proxy, with McCain’s decision to have her be his running mate. In the end, I voted for Obama, mainly because of that one decision. Part of it was that Palin presented the world in such stark terms, and that those terms seemed so . . . uninformed. Part of it was that in my short time in Maine, I’d already begun to meet many people who weren’t just sort of different from me. They were very different. LGBTQ+, different religions, different races (even in Maine), different politics, different socio-economic statuses. To hear Republicans paint some of these groups with so broad a brush felt wrong to me. It was forcing a black and white worldview on a situation that was anything but.
Four years went by. I heard many Republicans bemoan Obama as being terrible, even though I didn’t see anything that wrong with what he’d been doing. A different approach, perhaps, but I was more disillusioned with how little the rest of government seemed to get done. I continued to be dissatisfied with the way Republicans labeled other groups. It reminded me too much of the sort of ideology I’d seen skinheads espouse in Germany, and it made me very uncomfortable.
Still, when Mitt won the nomination, I voted for him. I believed he was a better person than how he was portrayed, and I thought he would do a great job as President. (Honestly, I still do. Though my criteria for “great job as President” has changed quite a bit over the Trump administration.) I wasn’t crushed when Obama won again, though. The last four years hadn’t been terrible, and I thought he’d gotten some good things accomplished. I knew many people who were desperate for good health care, for example, and I was happy that something was being done to get them access to it.
I met other politicians in the higher ranks of leadership. I met all of Maine’s Congresspeople. And Republicans began to stonewall just about anything that would come up for debate. I was very unhappy with their tactics, disappointed that they would dismiss as a matter of rule anything the Democrats came up with. Those four years of Obama’s second term made me like the Republicans less and less.
Cue the 2016 election. Clinton was far from my first choice. I had a deep-seated dislike of the Clintons that stretched back to my Limbaugh-loving days as a high schooler. I thought they were generally dishonest, and I had deep reservations about bringing them back to the White House. But the Republicans somehow managed to nominate Trump, and my opinion of him is well documented.
I voted for Clinton. It wasn’t even a contest in my mind.
Since then, my opinion of Republicans has fallen even further. The way they’ve thrown their values out the window in order to stay in power has nauseated me. All of that’s easy enough to trace on my blog, so I don’t need to go into details.
But let’s go over the main hot-button issues that separate the two parties today. (The non-Trumpian ones, at least):
Health Care: I believe our health care system is broken. It’s far too expensive, and it relies almost wholly on insurance. I would like to see affordable options for everyone. Do I want the whole thing socialized? Not necessarily. I just want someone to be able to be unemployed and still be able to get treated if they get cancer. I’m so sad every time I see another GoFundMe set up to help people pay for medical treatment. That’s a failure as a country to deliver basic care to all its citizens. The Affordable Care Act was a step in the right direction. I hoped it would be the first of many.Gun Control: Again, this is something I have documented on my blog. I am 100% in favor of gun control. Abortion: In general, I’m against abortion. But I believe there should be exceptions made for certain cases (rape, health of the mother/child, incest), and I’m not in favor of any laws that don’t allow for those exceptions. If the choice is “totally legal unrestricted” or “completely banned,” I will go with the first.War on Terror: I’m very disturbed by our country’s escalating use of drones to carry out assaults around the globe. The latest strike on the Iranian general was just the next step in this trend. I don’t like it. Overall, I think we’re spending too much on defense, but ironically, I think we need to keep spending that much on defense because we’re being such an international menace to so many.Immigration: The wall is a terrible idea. Closing our borders to so many is a terrible idea. The awful rhetoric being used against immigrants is despicable. The camps we’re stuffing refugees into are wrong on so many levels. Again, this harkens back to the days I spent befriending people in refugee camps in Germany. When you personally know people in these situations, it becomes much harder to ignore the plight of strangers in the same spot. You can’t dismiss individuals the same way you can dismiss labels.LGBTQ+: Now having known many more people who identify on LGBTQ+ issues, it’s increasingly difficult for me to justify laws that discriminate against them. It’s the same principle as the immigration question, for me. Environmentalism/Climate Change: How in the world anyone can continue to staunchly argue Climate Change isn’t real is beyond me. But then, people also believe vaccines cause autism and that the world is flat. People will believe all sorts of things, it seems. I would like to see an approach where we try our best to reduce our impact on the environment. Where we protect it instead of destroy it. Does that mean I’m going to stop flying? No. I’m not to that extreme. But we can do more, and I believe we should.Education: I work at an academic library. I see the difference a good education can make for students. I’m fully in favor of more education and making it affordable.Taxes/Redistribution of Wealth: I believe there’s a huge disparity today between the rich and the poor. The top tax rate is 40% right now. Historically, it’s been as high as 70-90%. I’m not saying it has to go that high again, but I do believe there are ways to pay for the different efforts we need to make to help our citizens have access to basic needs. Some of those ways are “higher taxes.”*
Overall, I find myself in the middle of many different issues. But lately Republicans have been painting things as an either/or situation. That black and white approach to all these issues makes me feel like I have to go with the option that’s more reasonable, and (to me) that’s almost always the one espoused by the Democrats. For example, would I be as staunchly in favor of gun control if some reasonable measures had already been passed? Doubtful.
I feel like the Republicans have shifted to the right by a great degree, and then dug in at that position and said that anything that disagrees with that position is terrible. I am concerned by the reaction of this (to have the Democrats go even stronger to the left), but until Trump can be shooed off the stage, I’m not sure what else can be done.
I have plenty of Democrat friends who think I’m far too conservative on many issues, and plenty of Republican friends who think I’m far too liberal. I tilt to the Democrat side of the aisle right now because of how repugnant I find Republican tactics, but I’d love a centrist approach, where reasonable measures are taken to solve big problems.
So . . . that’s the longer answer to the question. It still doesn’t feel like it’s the whole answer, but at least it gives some overview of where I was and why I am where I am now.
*I get a kick out of the current argument I’m seeing circulated among Republicans who want to support Social Security but say they’re against anything to do with Socialism. “Social Security is paid by the workers. They get out of it what they put into it.” Hogwash. I’m paying Social Security now with little hope that I’ll ever get out of it what I’m putting into it. I know it’s in precarious waters, and you know what? I’m at peace with that. Why? Because retirees need to live too, and me paying Social Security can help them. I pay taxes. Some of those taxes go to help me. Some of them go to help other people. But the thought that Social Security is somehow vastly different than other taxes just doesn’t hold water, in my book.
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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.
March 3, 2020
Who I’m Voting for and Why: 2020 Primary Edition
Another primary election season is upon us. This year, Maine is participating with a primary instead of a caucus for only the third time in its history. (For the record, I much prefer primaries. Let me go and vote and be done with it. I can’t stand the huge time suck that the caucus system always felt like to me. Sorry, people who actually like it.)
Due more to my inherent laziness than anything else, I continue to be a registered Republican. (If anything, I think I’d just unregister as a Republican and not register as anything else. But I have yet to be motivated to do so, because . . . why.) There’s only one option on the Republican ballot, and I would vote for literally anyone or anything other than Donald Trump. (I was trying to think of someone who would have to run against Donald Trump to get me to vote for Trump. Maybe if you had a necromancer bring Hitler or Stalin back to life, and then had one of them run for office, and the only other option was Trump . . . it would be a close call. I’d have to find out if the Republican party was going to back Zombie Hitler or not. Because if they weren’t, then I’d probably vote ZH, simply because I’d have to think he wouldn’t be able to get anything on his agenda passed without support from a major political party. What makes Trump so particularly awful is the way the Republican party has cashed in its values to embrace him. But I digress.)
So I won’t be voting for Trump. (I won’t bother to do a write-in vote, either, since a write-in vote will be counted as a blank vote, and remember: I’m lazy.)
If I were a Democrat, who would I vote for? Elizabeth Warren. Sorry, Bernie Bros and Biden Buds, I like Warren’s approach to things more than either of your candidate’s, and I certainly like her more than Bloomberg. Then again, to anyone making arguments of strategic voting (voting for a particular candidate because you believe the other candidates will lose against Trump), my response to that is a big “meh.” I think you should vote for whom you want to win. “Everyone” said Trump was unelectable. Everyone was wrong. I could see scenarios where a Bernie nomination results in hordes of scare tactics being used to keep Trump in office. I could see scenarios where a Biden win results in a bunch of disillusioned people just not voting at all. There’s a lot of time between November and now. Vote with your heart.
However, I will vote for whomever becomes the Democrat nominee, because I don’t care if we take out the Death Star by shooting an exhaust port right below the main port, or if we take it out by flying the Millennium Falcon right into the heart of the thing and blow it up there. All that matters to me is that Death Star comes out of the sky.
The only other issue on the ballot is an effort to veto the law that removed religious and philosophical loopholes to the requirement to vaccinate your children if they were going to attend public schools. Normally, I’d actually be fine with those loopholes. I respect the right for people to have religious beliefs that are different than mine, and as long as those beliefs don’t cause any serious harm, fine. But because so many people in our country have embraced the anti-vaccination movement, it’s causing our immunity to various diseases to crumble. And most of those people are using the religious/philosophical loophole to get out of the requirement. So . . . this is why we can’t have nice things, folks. I’m definitely voting no on that question.
Whether you agree with me or not, I hope you all go out and vote and participate in the process. Each and every vote matters, and the worst thing we can do is face our voting process each year with apathy. Vote!
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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.
