Celebration

Yesterday was our anniversary. I managed to remember, somehow. Maybe it was because The Redhead kept telling me “It’s our anniversary in three days!” and “It’s our anniversary in two days!” At least there was no danger of me not getting her something and thereby incurring her considerable wrath. And what did we do for our anniversary? We spent the evening unlocking things on Mario Kart Double Dash and Super Smash Brothers Melee. How romantic is that? We actually went out to dinner earlier in the evening, but the majority of the evening was spent “Smashing it up,” as my former roommate would put it. Life is good; Happy Anniversary to us.

We're loaded with booty

The Redhead and I have the most splendid dilemma. Most problems are unfortunate, or at the very least annoying. But this one is quite possibly the most marvelous problem I have ever encountered. We simply do not know how we’re going to get all of our Christmas gifts back to Utah in our car. Is that a great problem or what?

Since my internship ended after the first full week in December, we had almost three weeks of Christmas vacation. I actually don’t really like that much vacation time. I think a week or so is a good amount of time to visit family. But after a week I start to get bored with things and I just want to get back to business. In fact, if I could design the holiday, I’d split up the Christmas break and put part of it in spring so BYU could actually have a Spring Break during Winter Semester. Around March or so I really need a break. So since we were staring three weeks of nothing in the face, and our new apartment contract didn’t start until the 28^th of December so we couldn’t even move out earlier, we decided to split our time between our respective families. And it’s been very fun, since as soon as things get boring we change it up and go do something new, mooching off different family members. And it’s nice to spend time with both sides of the family during the Christmas season. But there was an unintended consequence of our dual visits: double presents.

As is my custom, I slept in a little on Christmas day. The Redhead’s siblings were banging at the door telling us to get up. “It’s Christmas! It’s Christmas!” they said. I shouted back, “No, it’s not Christmas, go back to bed!” which only increased the fury of their pounding. I’d like to think that they wanted us to spend Christmas with them, but they actually just wanted us to get up because they have a rule that you can’t open presents until everyone is awake and dressed. So we finally finished toying with the sibs and we all got dressed and went out into the living room, and we stood there gaping. We had struck the mother lode!

Our take for the day was truly impressive. The Redhead and I got a very nice keyboard piano, which is perfect for our apartment living since it has headphones. (Loud noises doth not good neighbors make.) I got several books, which is just about all I wanted. They all accused me of being a nerd for my book selection. (There is nothing wrong with asking for the complete works of Shakespeare and Plato’s Republic for Christmas.) We also got clothes and stuff, which I am of course addicted to. But we also got a game cube with a couple games and extra controllers and various electronic toys and gadgets. This was merely a part of the pile of stuff in the room, which also included a drum set, a new TV, and a stack of DVD’s that was more than 3 feet high when we piled them all together. What a great example of American consumerism. I would call it gross excess if I didn’t know how good of a deal The Redhead’s mom got on the stuff. So we got tons of loot. Good thing my parents gave us a new car to carry it all back to Utah.

It’s been a good Christmas.

Oh, the agony

We’ve done a lot of driving around the country lately, and we’ll do a lot more before we finally end up in Provo again. On Sunday The Redhead and I skipped out of church after sacrament meeting to travel to her grandparent’s house about 8 hours away. We really didn’t miss too much in church anyway, although the sacrament service warranted some commentary. It was one of the weirder meetings I have ever attended, including my time in Latin America and BYU singles wards. The program was comprised entirely of musical numbers and cutesy little stories that made me want to roll my eyes and make fun of them. (Oh, that’s right, I actually did that.) To tell the truth, the closest thing I can compare it to would be a meeting from some other church. I later found out that the ward music coordinator (I didn’t even know my home ward had one of those) planned the whole thing with little or no input from the bishopric, which probably explains why it was something straight out of the UCC or something. The music numbers were almost universally off-key and/or slightly odd, with one exception that was actually rather nice. The Primary parts were fine; little kids shouting out the lyrics are cute and rather funny. But high-school kids screeching out off-key notes are not so cool. Too bad my home ward excels at such audio torture. There was one song with all the Young Women singing (once again, off-key) and a little girl playing her violin. It might have been cute if the Young Women had practiced or if the little girl had tuned her violin with the piano. Ugh, it still hurts. Another musical number involved a guy singing “O Holy Night” and playing his guitar. I was actually quite impressed with the guitar-playing, even though I’m not sure it belongs in sacrament meeting. But his singing style was heavily influenced by Kurt Cobain, and it was downhill from there.

In-between the nails-on-chalkboard singing they had various people come up and read stories or poems about Christmas. These, also, were the worst mainstream Christianity has to offer, and several of them weren’t even close to being doctrinally sound. They involved Jesus showing up in a mall at Christmas-time and wondering what was going on, or Santa crying and pleading with the people to remember the true meaning of Christmas. It was pure kitsch. So when the meeting finally wrapped up after an hour and a half, I was ready to jet. And so we did.

'Tis the season

Shopping is quite possibly the most tiring thing in the entire world. I would really rather run 10 miles than shop for the equivalent period of time, and my legs wouldn’t be so tired and my back wouldn’t hurt at all. What is it about standing next to racks of clothes and shelves of kitchenware that saps my strength? Perhaps this type of activity is my version of kryptonite. If so, where are my super powers that manifest themselves in the absence of shopping? C’mon, scathing satire is cool, but it’s not exactly a super power. Even Maureen Dowd can pull that off.

So The Redhead and I have done some hardcore shopping these last few days now that we have a car. I must admit, I was very glad to see my old beater car. It’s really my baby. It’s not doing too well lately, so I know I’ll have to soon part company with it, but it keeps kicking. So we have been glorying in our newfound transportation and we hit the mall and lots of other fun stores that we missed while we were in D.C. It just wouldn’t be Christmas without a little stress and angst while trying to get to the mall in a snowstorm.

Speaking of snow, we have lots of it. We got about 6 inches in one day, and other areas of the region got up to 23 inches in one night. Holy cow, that is a lot of snow, especially since we had 60-degree weather back in D.C. Actually, I like the snow better so far, because the 60-degree weather was accompanied by rain and gray skies for weeks at a time. It’s been a winter wonderland, and I’ve had to shovel the driveway three times already this week. I don’t mind it too much, though, because it’s nice to have a house. The Redhead and I are staying in my grandfather’s house, since he is in a nursing home and has no need of it at the moment. It’s fun, like we’re “playing house,” although if we were really playing house, I’d decorate a little better. My grandmother, rest her soul, had very different tastes than I do.

So since it is the season, we went out and got a Christmas tree today. The Redhead had never gone out in a field looking for a tree to cut down, so since this is our tradition, she came along for the experience. We got on our big boots and coats to keep warm from the cold and the inevitably snowball fight that ensued, and drove out to the rural areas where there are Christmas tree farms. After tromping around in the snow a while we found several great candidates, and eventually settled on a very nice blue spruce. Around that time my younger brother broke our temporary truce by shoving snow down my neck, and I was forced to retaliate by pinning him to the ground in a most un-sportsmanlike way and grind snow on his face. He complained for a while, but he was back to taking cheap shots at the back of my head in a few minutes, so I don’t think he’s any worse for the wear. Christmas traditions are truly wonderful.

Exodus

You never know how much junk you own until you have to pack it up and schlep it across town or across country. And I, my friends, have a lot of junk. I may like to mock America’s über-consumerism, but I enjoy having stuff just as much as the next bloke. So I’ve just spent a long day packing and cleaning, and I’m bushed. I wish I could say that I won’t have to do that again for a long time, but I already know that I’ll have to move again after next semester. Why, you ask? ‘Cuz I just got accepted to law school and I now have a definitive exit strategy for my BYU experience.

This whole semester I’ve enjoyed DC immensely, but I like Provo too. It’s really more of a people thing than a place thing, although I do like the skiing and the hiking. Although the greater Provo/Orem area isn’t exactly the cultural epicenter of the West, it’s a nice place to live for a while. But I never planned on staying forever, and I never could see myself old and raising a family in Utah. So now I’m heading back to finish up, and then I’ll be heading out. And to tell the truth, I’ll be very sad to go. It’s not just the fact that I’ll have to stop writing for the Board, although that certainly does strike fear into my heart. It’s saying good-bye to everyone that made my college career worthwhile. This time around is just for practice; next time we pack up and go, it’s for good. So I’ll bid farewell to my fair Verona, knowing full well that it isn’t mine anymore. It’s okay; I’ll make my new city my new home, and it’ll be really cool. But the gray lining to the silver crowd is what you leave behind.

So blogging from DC, this is Benvolio signing off.

Overheard on the Metro

Today as I got on the Red Line from Metro Center there was a grumpy mother with her bouncy little daughter that got on the train with me. The train was pretty full, so mom sat in a seat in front of the little girl instead of next to her. The little girl looked so cute, with her hair in lots of little braids and her big poofy coat that was almost bigger than she was. She sat in the seat with her little legs dangling off the edge and looked up at the guy next to her. He was a big white guy with a beard, bandana, and a motorcycle helmet on his lap, staring emotionless into the tunnel. He couldn’t have been more different than the cheerful little black girl sitting at his side.
She looked at him for a minute, and then pointed to his helmet and asked, “Whuzzat?” He glanced down at her, and after a moment he replied, “It’s a helmet.”
“Oh,” she said. Then, “Whuzzit for?”
“For my motorcycle.” Her eyes got really big.
“A monercycle? Wow.” I was impressed that she knew what a motorcycle was, since she was so young. The little girl’s mom shot her an angry look to keep quiet, but the big guy was clearly warming up her already.
“Izzit fast?”
“Well,” he said, “it’s pretty fast. But I can’t drive it as fast as I want to.”
She got so excited that she climbed up and was hugging his arm, looking at the helmet. “Ifa I hadda monercycle, I go so fast!” (Mom glared again and told her to get down and stop bothering that man, but it was too late—they were already buddies.)
“Would you go faster than a speeding bullet?” he asked. She looked puzzled for a second.
“Iza bullet fast?”
“Yes, it’s very very fast.”
“Yay! Fast!”
By this point half the subway car was listening the conversation and smiling. Mom still looked a little cross with the little girl, but she was so endearing it was hard to be stern. The train pulled into Judiciary Square and mom said to her daughter, “C’mon, honey, it’s our stop.”
“Ohhhh.” She sighed disappointedly, let go of the helmet, and climbed down from her seat. She looked back at the biker guy and waved. “Bye!” she said.
The big burly guy smiled and waved back. And I got off at the next stop in a very good mood. That overheard conversation made my day.

All good things

As is tradition, I have successfully procrastinated the day of my repentance once again, so I have been working furiously on several projects this week. I have had a month and a half to do a couple of them and all semester to do the other two, so it just serves me right. I am, after all, very good at procrastinating. So it’s been crunch week here in the Capital City, and I’m suddenly realizing that I have to leave this place. Despite my last blog entry, I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here. I find myself looking nostalgically at the Capitol Building on my way home form work and thinking how strange it will be to not see all these now-familiar sights. I just used to this place. Heck, I just got here!

I’ll be staying late at work again tonight to spend some quiet time on some of these projects. So far I have managed to be very productive, and I’m almost done with my second-to-last assignment. All that stands in my way from getting a perfect 4.0 is a 15-page research paper. Fortunately, I’ve already done a lot of the research. Unfortunately, one of the people who was in the office for a week took off with my careful notes, so I’ll have to go through the material again to dig out the good stuff. But I’ll get it done by Friday. And then we’ll spend a crazy 24 hours cleaning every mess we made over the last 3 months, and we’ll start our crazy cross-country trip. I miss this town already, and I haven’t even left.

City

One of my first posts talked about my “fair Verona,” the city of Washington, D.C. I visited here when I was 18 and fell in love with the city, the sites, and the opportunities. For the next several years it was somewhat of an unconscious goal of mine to live here. When the opportunity presented itself I took it. So here I am, living my small dream. But DC ain’t all glitz and glamour. Behind all the federal buildings and congressional hearings and fancy hotels and expensive cars there is a dirty side of the city. Grimy streets, honking horns, dirty panhandlers, wailing sirens, and all the other not-so-idealistic elements of a large city. I fell in love with the city and I still love it, but I don’t see things so idealistically as I did when I was 18.

The most striking thing to me is how lonely people can be here. I’m not just talking about the homeless guy that sits under the tree on my way to the Metro. There is an element of loneliness in a lot of people here. You can be in a crowded subway car and be all alone. You can be hurrying your way to work through the flow of people and be all by yourself. No one makes eye contact, no one looks at you, no one knows your name. The juxtaposition of crowds and solitude is truly ironic.

That's not the only stark contrast. It's surprising how if you walk two blocks in one direction you will pass both towering office buildings and boarded-up storefronts. You see the good and the bad. I pass beautiful Christmas decorations, monuments, and parks on my way to work. But I also pass cigarette butts, trash, and used condoms on the sidewalk on my way to church. Just down the street from where I live there are several posh hotels. They seem really nice, but you have to remember the bad side of things when you read in the paper that people there were held up at gunpoint last week. I myself am in the middle of a contrast right now. I'm trying to do and experience everything I wanted to do before I have to leave, while simultaneously trying to finish all the work I have to do before I'm done.

This blog entry is also a stark contrast to the overly optimistic entry I wrote at the beginning of my stay here. Maybe it's just because today is a Monday. Or maybe it's because I've gotten a better view of what the city is like. I still encourage anyone to visit, however. Even seeing the good and the bad, it's still worth the trip. And given the chance to do it over, I'd do the exact same thing and come to DC. It's crazy and busy and sometimes gritty and ugly, but there's no other place like it in the world.

That's cold

This morning The Redhead and I got up and were eating breakfast when our neighbor called and asked if we had hot water. I went to the sink and turned the hot water on full blast and it came freezing cold. Our neighbor could hear my anguished howl through the walls, so she didn’t need to hear my answer when I actually got back on the phone. Our hot water tank is tricksy; the pilot light likes to go out without warning, and we don’t discover that it’s off until two days later when the hot water runs out. Unfortunately, by that point it will take another day or two before we can get the hot water tank up to temperature again, so we’re in for a cold water day.

This is the second time in 3 months that the hot water has gone out in our building. There was also an additional time when the pilot light for the heating system (which also uses water pipes) went out and the heat began blowing cold air. This conveniently happened just as the weather turned cold. That was a chilly night; I’m shivering just thinking about it. I spent two years in Latin America, and most of that time was without a water heater. I got used to it, and it was usually so cold I didn’t mind. Sometimes we had these little water heaters hooked up to the shower heads called “duchacornas” (shower crowns). These actually did an okay job of warming up the water as it came out of the spigot, but they had a bad habit of zapping you because of their bad wiring. Being shocked while wet and naked is an unpleasant experience. I thought treatment like that only happened to people in the Hanoi Hilton until I got to experience it for myself. So I just took cold showers from then on.

The Redhead, however, does not like cold water. At all. Actually, she doesn’t like cold anything. Cold weather, cold rain, cold feet, etc. She wasn’t too happy at the prospects of taking a freezing cold shower, so we ended up boiling a bunch of pots of water and mixing it with the cold bathwater so she could take a warm bath instead of an ice shower. This took a while, since our current collection of cooking ware is somewhat limited. It probably wasted a lot of electricity by repeatedly heating up pots of water on the stove, but electricity is included in our rent and we figured it serves the management right for not paying attention to the hot water heater. Not wanting to repeat the 45-minuted heating process again, I just gritted my teeth and took a cold shower. I wish I could say I proved my manliness by enduring the process stoically, but in reality I gasped for breath and screamed, “Sweet mother of pearl, that’s cold!” I actually got somewhat used to the temperature by the time I got done, but the water was so cold that when I rinsed the shampoo out of my hair it gave me a cold headache like I gobbled up a snocone too fast. After I got out my skin was crimson, like I had been slapped with an open palm repeatedly.

However, we survived the experience. And honestly, it could have been worse. Last time the hot water went out my mother-in-law was staying with us. It was right after we got married, and I thought, “Now there’s a way to impress your in-laws.” So I spent the morning boiling water for baths. I feel a sudden connection with Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Check out the Zoo

Just a quick advertisement, now that the pictures are working properly. If you haven't seen The Redhead's blog on the Zoo, go check it out. It's my favorite blog entry ever.

Glad I'm not there

Here's a funny little tidbit, courtesy of The Onion.

The Iraqi Terror Alert System

This is kind of funny, but at the same time, I know that my friends and family members over there have to deal with that stuff every day. Let's just hope they can pull out at some point and leave the Iraqi people relatively self-sufficient. The real losers here aren't even the troops; at least they can go home eventually. The losers are the vast majority of Iraqis that just want to go to work and have a home and a family. They're the ones getting torn apart by car bombs. The insurgents are really doing a good job of shooting their own country in the foot. Maybe they'll get that top color, "Paradise."

All we like sheep

A year ago this month I got married. It was simultaneously hectic and wonderful. Like any important life event, it had its share of crises. For example, my family’s van broke down on Christmas day as we were driving to The Redhead’s neck of the woods. Life never lets things happen too easily. But after all was said and done, most things didn’t really change. We were still two poor young college students and we still had to return to real life and work and school. I think 23 is a very young age to get married, but we both knew it was the right thing to do so we took the plunge.

An article by the Associated Press this week called this to mind when it reported on recent findings by the Census Bureau about marriage in America. They reported that in 1970 the average woman was 20.8 years old when she got married and the average man was 23.2 years old. The figures for 2003 show that women now wait until they are an average of 25.3 years old and men wait until they are 27.1 years old. According to those numbers, I shouldn’t be married for another couple years. A separate study was done among people ages 20 to 24, finding what percentage had never been married. In 1970 it was 36% for women and 55% for men. Last year it was 75% for women and 86% for men. So as young Americans approach the proverbial “menace to society” point, the overwhelming majority of them still aren’t married. I find this to be a fascinating statistic.

When I got engaged I told several old friends the “good news.” They nodded politely and gave their congratulations but the look in their eyes and the tone in their voices clearly said, “Are you crazy? You’re not even out of your undergrad yet!” One or two of them were even so forthcoming as to voice their concerns. “Are you serious?” they asked. I assured them that I was indeed telling the truth. “Wow,” they said, “you’re brave.” They have always been supportive but skeptical of many of my life decisions, such as being a missionary for 2 years. They can tell it is something important to me, but they just don’t quite get it. Ultimately, they were very happy for me, but I could tell they were glad it was me getting married and not them.

Contrast that with every other Institute lesson, fireside, or talk from your bishopric in your singles’ ward, and you get a very confusing set of mixed messages. I think I can kind of understand why Church leaders hammer this point home so hard—if they don’t speak up and encourage people to get married, then people will probably listen to the world and keep putting it off in lieu of schooling or professions. However, it still bugs me sometimes how much we hear about marriage. When I was single it got to the point where I would whip out my Palm and start reading a book as soon as a speaker started delving into the trite marriage rhetoric. Heck, I am married and I get tired of it sometimes. But despite the sometimes-tactless delivery, I know that the Church leaders are more right than what society is telling us.

For me, getting married involved taking back a lot of nasty things I said about getting hitched. My freshman year I heard so many talks on the subject that my roommate and I banned the use of the “M” word from our dorm room. I swore I’d be 40 by the time I found someone with enough patience to put up with me for eternity. But just a few years later I found myself eating my own words as I met The Redhead. She helped me change my mind, using her Redhead Powers, so I’ve been taking all those things back every since. It still pains me a little to have fallen into the cliché, but my nonconformity urge wasn’t enough to keep me from taking the plunge.

I think conformity actually has a lot to do with it. Many of my friends probably see my choices as blindly following Church dogma like a stupid sheep. In their eyes, I went on a mission because I was supposed to, and I got hitched early because I was supposed to, and they’re probably expecting me to start having lots of kids immediately because I’m supposed to. (I’m sure that’ll come soon enough, but they’ll be sorely disappointed on that last one.) I see it as very ironic, because in reality it is they who are the blind followers. I did all that stuff because I truly wanted to; in fact, in some cases the pressure to do those things made me less inclined to do them. But my friends have all bought into society’s view of things. They wouldn’t think about getting married and having a family until they were done with their education, secure financially, with a good job and a home. Shoot, by the time I have all that I won’t even be able to have kids. As the AP article indicated, more and more people in America are buying into the notion that education and career come first, with marriage and family as an optional and inferior goal. Who’s the slave to conformity now?

That's a hazard

I get distracted easily when I sit down to write an entry. Frequently I’ll launch into an intro for the topic I’m thinking about and seven paragraphs later I realize that I’m not going to get to the original topic. I sat down several times to write about smoking but I got delightedly sidetracked on some other tangent that turned out to be more entertaining at the time than a diatribe on tobacco. This morning as I came out of the Metro I was thinking that I should write about smoking before I leave DC, because just being in this city makes me glad I don’t smoke. As I walked in front of Union Station, thinking about what I could write about smoking, the woman in front of me exhaled a big cloud of noxious fumes that was carried by the wind right into my face. Since anger (or at least annoyance) is a great motivator, I’m writing my spiel today.

Years and years ago my Boy Scout troop went on a boat trip for a few days. The scoutmaster knew someone who had a boat, and they were foolish enough to lend it to a Boy Scout troop for a long weekend. Needless to say, the trip was extremely fun. One of the most memorable moments of the trip was when the boat was pulling into a marina. As the boat passed another boat, all the Scouts attentions were caught by a scantily clad chick lounging out on the deck of the other boat. As they all watched, mesmerized, she casually pulled out a cigarette and lit it. One of the more obnoxious guys hung over the edge of the boat and leered at her, “Hey babeeeee! That’s attractive!” The scoutmaster hastily steered the boat away before her big bruiser boyfriend could pulverize the mouthy kid.

Although I don’t agree with the delivery, his sentiment is truly shared: smoking is quite possibly the most disgusting habit ever invented. I realized that there are plenty of filthy habits, but smoking is a serious contender for King of Gross. I can kind of see why other vices might be attractive to people. Gambling has a certain thrill to it; drinking looks like a lot of fun at first; drugs can give you a great buzz for a few minutes; sex seems fun and harmless. As long as you don’t look at the long-term consequences (like losing your money, hangovers and drunk driving accidents, overdoses, STD’s and unwanted pregnancies) those things could appear attractive. But smoking? Your body doesn’t even let you do it at first—every first-time smoker coughs and gags. And where’s the pay-off? You never really feel good when you smoke; the most it can offer is bringing you closer to normal if you’re an addicted smoker. Watching my smoking co-workers huddle together in the cold in the designated smoking areas outside does not make me want to take up the habit.

I understand why some people took up smoking years ago. I’m glad we had modern revelation that gave us a clue about the health hazards a hundred years in advance, but back when the dangers of smoking weren’t known I understand how people would start up. The tobacco companies, knowing full well that their products were hazardous, tried very hard to make smoking look cool while they upped the nicotine content. They successfully hooked a whole generation on cigarettes. But when the plain facts started making it obvious that sucking on cancer sticks is going to chop short your life (and make what life you do have miserable), then you’d think that people would wise up. But no, no they don’t. Of all vices, it is the one I am least likely to start. I think I’d be more likely to pick up a hobby of hitting myself in the head with a hammer.

In middle school there was a bunch of kids that would walk a block from school so they were just out of sight of the school and they would smoke on the corner. Without exception they were the dregs of junior high society. In some ways smoking is like a penalty for being stupid. Just like the lottery is a tax on people who can’t do math. Have you ever seen how much money a chain smoker spends on cigarettes every year? These people could be taking fabulous European vacations with the money they spend on cigarettes! I don’t know about you, but the French Riviera sounds a lot nicer to me than the back of the building in 20-degree weather.

A lot of people smoke in DC, just like most other places in the U.S. (The Utah Valley is somewhat abnormal in this light.) Recent statistics show that in Kentucky the majority of the adult population smokes (51%). These people are going to be sucking away my taxes through Social Security and medical costs over the next several decades. You would think they would have to ask my permission first, but they weren’t so polite. What’s more, the federal government actually subsidizes tobacco production in many states. (The Republicans just shoved a nice tobacco-friendly bill through right before the election, thus ensuring the presidential vote of North Carolina and West Virginia. Stupid Republicans.) I’ve told myself that if I ever get in a position to take on these tobacco subsidies, I will. Who knows, maybe in 20 or 30 years I’ll help fix the stupid mess. But for now I’ll just continue to breath second-hand smoke every time I enter a building and gripe about it on my blog.