my bedfellow!

With fond memories of watching her take a syntax test wearing a purple penguin suit for some six hours one Saturday in autumn:






Everyone should be in love with her.


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morally ambivalent again

Yesterday our home teachers came. This exactly the second time I've been home taught since I returned to Bloomington, but that's about about par for the course in my home-taught life on the whole, so no complaints there. In fact, my complaints in general should be minimal: I like these home teachers. They brought a message from The Economist instead of the Ensign, let all kinds of liberal propaganda slip by with little objection, and didn't pretend they were going to do anything for us even if we asked. And it's barely halfway through the month, so this wasn't even the traditional stalk-you-out-and-cough-a-spiritual-thought-on-you-before-the-clock-strikes-midnight that's so often been my experience of home teaching.

And yet, for some reason, I was mean. I was mean to the Elders' Quorum president (whom I also like) while we were discusisng it at FHE. I was mean while talking to my roommates about the fact that they were coming. And I was mean when they came. I was also, naturally, funny, but mostly, I was just mean.

There's a long and varied list of things to dislike about me -- lazy! unfocused! messy! irresponsible! logorrheic! arrogant! weird teeth! self-indulgent! dirty-minded! morally ambivalent! no upper body strength! -- but this is the one that I'm pretty sure I like the least. You can work around laziness and self-indulgence and make your peace with being a weird-toothed wimp; if nothing else, I've gotten a novel, an essay, and an email address out of being morally ambivalent. Meanness, though, speaks to something twisted at the core. Meanness writes people off for a short-lived rhetorical payoff. Meanness is unethical at lengths and heights to shame all the Walmart-shopping and music-piracy I and my hypocritical liberal conscience regularly shun.

I don't know where it comes from: if I have a secret fear and loathing of home teachers, if the one of them who reminds me of myself just brings out something awful in me, or if I am just, despite all my pretense, a mean person. Whatever the reason, I woke up today with a morally ambivalent hangover and an impulse to apologize to everyone I know for the inconvenience of my existence.

Sorry, home teachers, wherever you are. Bet you're racking up celestial kingdom brownie points for putting up with me, though.

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Helen Andelin rolls over in her recently-dug grave.

Since the whole concept of gender roles is basically, what, a Victorian attempt to re-invent the historical subjugation of women as either some kind of condescending program of protectionism or just the natural consequence of natural sex differences which, naturally, we need to enforce? -- I've been thinking it's time to do a little re-inventing of my own. I mean, men have gotten to be the one in the deciding-role roles for most of human history, so it's my turn already.

I have therefore done some very thorough and thoughtful research and come up with my own set of gender roles -- based on, of course, no considerations but those of what men and women are distinctly and uniformly suited for. These are, according to my exhaustive inquiry into the matter, the roles we should all, by divine design, do our utmost to fulfill in our marriages. (Or, rather, in your marriages, and maybe their marriages, since I don't have one. Gotta watch those plural pronouns.)


Wife
~work at a fun, artsy, unpredictable, save-the-whales kind of job where the world is made a better place
~plan all trips and vacations and huge exciting projects and manage the Netflix queue.
~do all the cooking
~do all yardwork
~keep everyone well-dressed according to a rotation of sub-cultural aesthetics
~read the children Harry Potter, teach them about medieval literate culture, practice Latin declensinons with them, take them to museums and on picnics and road trips, dress them up as pirates on Halloween, and let them get their noses pierced when they turn fifteen and alienated.

Husband
~work a boring but financially secure corporate flunky job that provides health care for the whole family
~deal with taxes, bills, and anything that comes in a form, except surveys and censuses, which are actually kind of fun to fill out.
~do all the dishes
~do all housework, and especially the laundry
~sew, mend, patch, and darn any ripped or otherwise damaged clothes
~work out patient but firm ways of disciplining the kids when they have needless screaming meltdowns or light the couch on fire; generally, raise them to be responsible and ethically mature, instead of just pirates with noserings.


I assume everyone will be completely on board with this because, after all, it's just the way we inherently are. I, as a woman, am much too flighty to deal with taxes, and my sensual aesthetics are too delicate for me to do the dishes. He [whoever], as a man, is just too brutish to handle the intricacies of baking, and too unfocused to mow the whole lawn without getting distracted by something shiny.

Good? Good.

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this just in

My last few posts have been obscenely long, maybe just to make up for the dearth of posting immediately preceding them, but nonetheless, before I find myself trapped in a ponderous rut of prolixity, let me just recommend the following:

Embrace comma splices.

And, in other cognitively dissonant news, I'll still be marking them wrong in my freshlings' drafts.

Still, I'd like to see a t-shirt:

Have You Hugged a Comma Splice Today?

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counting your unknown quantities before you've solved for x

The twist no one saw coming is that I have lately acquired a Suitor. Although hardly unwelcome, he is unexpected, most immediately because I've been shamelessly basking in the official deferral of my dating life for the last two and a half years, and haven't exactly been impatient for the hiatus to come to an end. The last time I broke up with someone, a few months before I put my mission papers in, it was angsty and regretful and and also shot with an unfair thrill of freedom: I was done. I was standing at the front door of two-years-at-least with no boys, no boyfriends, no men, no manfriends, no lovers, swains, or paramours, and no dirty jokes, and while I missed the dirty jokes acutely, two years of hormone supression proved, for me, restorative.

(Granted I'm glossing right past the revolving door of impressionable immigrants who found my hideous shoes irresistible, not to mention the inexplicable malady of elder-crushing which had one or two of my companions enthralled in its IQ-suffocating grip, but all that mostly just served to remind me further of what a nuisance that half of the human race really is. What does everyone see in these boy people, anyway?)

Also, even if I had embraced that dating is what comes next, in that grand Mormon life-plan which has so far mostly just served as a humorous foil to my actual life, my breath has never exactly been bated in anticipation of the day a Melyngoch-appropriate Suitor would roll into the Bloomington YSA branch on his hybrid motorcycle, flash his ACLU membership card in my direction, whisper a few sweet nothings about human rights and immigration law, and then take off his disguise to reveal that he is, in fact . . . Remus Lupin! Or even just The Librarian. (Superfluous graduate degrees are so hot right now. ) Whatever the timing, I'm still in the location, and while the Bloomington branch Relief Society may be the best thing to hit the Mormon church since the 1890 Manifesto, the Elders Quorum doesn't exactly inspire a girl to start throwing herself into the paths of suitable men.

Neither the When nor the Where, however, can compete with the absurdist surreality of Who; if you had told me two months ago that two months from then I would willingly be Suited by this Suitor, I would have snorted Mountain Dew out my nose. (That was slightly before I quit caffeine the last time.) He is, after all, damnably happy. Almost no public displays of angst at all. Also he doesn't have 22 college degrees and isn't the secret curator of the world's largest collection of mythological artefacts, and I do have standards. But somewhere around our third date, I realized he was starting to change my mind.

It's actually very pleasant to be surprised by people, and it happens to me an awful lot. When I first met Katya, I dismissed her as boringly nice (and she me as cranky and mean) for a good half the semester, before she made her first dirty grammar joke and the next nine years of best friendship were launched. My favorite mission companion likewise struck me as nice when I first met her, and while I was filled with that slightly brainwashed idealistic determination of most trainers to make it the Best Transfer Ever, I was also initially just a little skeptical we'd ever get past nice to fun (the highest virtue in my personal cosmology). More recently, I never bothered getting to know one of my two roommates before I moved in with her, because, you know, she seemed nice. Turns out she's also smart and sassy and not infrequently hilarious and lets me talk both ears off without getting that glazed look. Who knew?

(One might draw from the foregoing paragraph that I don't like nice people. This is not at all true. I don't like nice people at first. I usually like them a lot later, once I get a glimpse of the roiling dysfunctional rage beneath the niceness, the searing depths of untempered existential crisis, the agony of being which their civility serves to smother. Then once I'm done reimagining everyone I know as an Edith Wharton character, I often remember that while nice may be different from good, the two are not mutually exclusive. And I'm nothing if not a sucker for a core of basic goodness with a little revel of social satire and the odd crunch of personal dissatisfaction , all wrapped up in a deceptively nice candy shell.)

Then there's Tiny Pin, the smartest baby ever to learn the consonant /j/, the cutest baby ever to giggle while trying to eat a New Yorker magazine, and the best-dressed baby ever to own six different pairs of overalls. I was just a little bit trepidatious about coming back to Bloomington with a (then) two-month-old niece in the mix, since I generally fear and loathe babies, all babies; I recognize what few people do, which is that babies have plots in their lying little alien-shaped heads; they want to destroy us all. Except for this one, who makes me melt. And not in the trick-me-into-climbing-into-the-microwave sense, either; I mean that she looks up at me with her enormous blue eyes, and my brain turns into happy sludge, and I want to drift around on fluffy pink clouds singing her to sleep with Led Zeppelin songs and stuffed caterpillars.

There's the Hulking ManFriend, who I pretty much thought was a stunning jackass the first time I met him, but has evolved since into one of my favorite people in Bloomington and one of my best friends in the English department. There's the student last semester who wouldn't talk in class for the first month, was winning herself a boring slew of C+s and B-s on all her assignments, and then one day popped up office hours to tell me that her dream to is to do non-profit work in developing nations and that she plans to join the Peace Corpse as soon as she graduates; her final paper was a way-cooler-than-average deconstruction of the portrayal of homosexual characters in romantic comedies, and I enjoyed a swelling of teacherly pride.

The argument could be made that I'm habitually too quick to judge and should hold out until I have good evidence instead of just circumstantial first impressions. That's a fair argument, if one most often made by, ahem, nice people. But on the other hand, if you assume the best about everyone, you're only ever surprised in a bad way. If you assume the worst, life is just one happy reversal after another. I get to not only love Tiny Pin, but be happily and wholly awe-struck that I love her. I generally enjoy scrabbling through the rough (the lazy, self-centered, overindulged, lemming-like and uninspiring rough) to find the occasional cubic zirconium (better than diamonds: more affordable and rarely mined by slave children) among my freshlings. And it's unexpectedly enlivening, having one's mind changed by a Suitor, with his egregious good cheer and unplumbed depths of nerdiness. Yet, I emphasize, none of these pleasures of discovery would be possible if I weren't just a tiny bit misanthropic to begin with. So let us all raise a half-empty glass to skepticism, cynicism, sneering and satire, and then also to that modicum of open-mindedness which keeps me perpetually pleasantly surprised, in spite of myself.

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job and jobbigt

The original plan was for me to teach this summer. Honestly, I never pursued that plan very thoroughly, partially because I was busy, partially because I tend to ride the well-it'll-all-work-out wave just as far as it can take me, which keeps me cheerful but sometimes keeps me unemployed too, and partially because deep down, I didn't want to teach this summer. Teaching is hard. I'm bored of hard.

So instead I got a job doing survey research. This isn't the kind of job where you sit in a shopping mall and politely ask accomodating people to fill out a five-minute paper survey (which is how I always imagined surveys and polling were done, suggesting I may have seen it happen in a movie once); rather, it's the kind of job where you sit in a cubicle and invade people's homes via the telephone and then inform them you'll stay (via the telephone) for 25 minutes, or call back eight thousand times trying to get them to change their mind.

The positive aspects of this job:

~It's not tracting. It's a little like tracting (most people just want to ignore you, a few want to insult you, and mostly just the crazy ones will listen), but you're sitting in an air-conditioned office with no pantyhose in sight. You get those crazy tracting-like stories, but with only a quarter the tracting effort. (Also re: not-tracting, if people answer the phone naked, you don't have to know about it.)

~You might be able to get away with faking an Australian accent on most of your calls. Even a pretty bad Australian accent, if all your coworkers are linguistically disinterested.

~Sometimes you find out that there's a place in the world called Compound, Texas.

~On nights when you work late calling the west coast, the supervisors bring in treats. They're not the treats I would bring in if I had a company credit card (strawberries? chocolate truffles? blackberry lemonade? . . . ), but free hot cocoa and graham crackers are, still, nothing to sneer at. Even if they didn't have marshmallows.

~People might give answers to demographic questions that include the phrase "Jesus race."

On the other hand:

~It's deadly boring.

~It doesn't pay particularly well.

~I dislike any job that requires me to pretend to be nicer than I really am.

~Sometimes I have to work when So You Think You Can Dance is on.

~This is one of those jobs where creativity, initiative, and adjustment to circumstances are actively discouraged. Granted, I didn't get hired at the Center for Survey Research expecting to find a creative outlet tucked away in the dusty corner of my cubicle, but still, the attitude that We Have Protocols And You'd Darn Well Better Adhere To Them, I Don't Care If The Person You're Interviewing is 101 Years Old And Eighty Percent Deaf stirs into a frenzy whatever grains of common sense remain rattling around in my skull.

~Now that I've vomited into a recycling bin in the break room, I'd very much like to quit before I have to see anyone there ever again.

Happily, last week I was offered a job. In fact, less than twenty-eight hours elapsed between the time I heard about the job and the time I was officially hired, a personal best which I expect never to replicate. The new job is as a "light" copyeditor for an academic journal which is managed on campus (though published in, naturally, Singapore; it's an International Studies journal, so I guess how surprised could I be?). I hoped that "light" would refer to which side of the Force the academics in question subscribe to, but it turned out to mean "not difficult or thorough," possibly a clipping of "lightweight."

Essentially I read the style sheet and then read the papers and make sure the papers do what the style sheet says they should. Also I occasinally add commas when I can't help myself. It's pretty straightforward, not too taxing work that isn't exactly a creative outlet either, but seems less hampered by beaurocracy, arbitrary standards, and crazy people.

Except, that is, for the academic writers, who definitely don't dry their socks on the Force's good side. I understand that jargon has a place. I understand that they're not writing for the plebian audience who's doing their copyediting. I understand that writing style is valued less in most academic fields than it is in, say, my freshling comp classroom. But really? Really? Does "problematics" have to be a word? Must all sentences be burdened with at least six prepositional phrases? For that matter, can we talk about guidelines for the number of embedded clauses you try to juggle at once? I'll accept "Habermasian," "Freudian," and even "Foucaultian," but surely not all proper names need their own -ian derived adjective. And can we maybe sometimes (ab)use a prefix without the parentheses and that clever dual meaning you're trying to sneak in to the sentence without comment or defense?

But, all things considered:

~It pays substantially better.

~I can do this from anywhere my computer will follow me.

~It's 10 hours a week, so I can keep the job during the semester.

~It takes almost no creative or intellectual energy, which may sound like a bad thing, until you remember that, during the semester, all other parts of my life take up a whole lot of creative an intellectual energy, much more than I really have to offer.

~If I can just get past the congealed gravy-like texture of the prose, I'll probably learn some interesting things about international studies.

~My employer is a gruff (yes, purple) but friendly poly sci professor who remarked after our interview, "I've never hired a fairy princess before." Granted he got it wrong (elven princess, people), but anyone who will make slightly nerdy and potentially offensive jokes in a job interview situation is someone I can handle working for. (The first time I met my favorite professor at BYU, less than month after The Fellowship of the Ring came out, I clarified my name, and the prof said, snickering, "Giddy-up." Eventually I worked for him, too.)

~Most importantly, clawing through these dry-as-Mars paragraph-long sentences is a good reminder for me: don't become an academic. I mean, I'm going to be an academic, but I don't have to be an academic academic, with the two-centimeter-wide specialty and no sense of style. I can be a fun academic, and stick to the principle that it's always better to write something that someone might someday enjoy reading. (To be fair, for all I know these professors are wide-ranging, stylish, and lively in person, and merely don't communicate that well in writing.)

~(OK, actually, that was second-most-importantly, after the money.)

The really glaring downside to both of these: For the next two weeks I have both jobs, which means I'm working a whopping thirty hours a week. Thirty hours. It's hard to get in two naps a day and a full hour of facebook-surfing with that kind of schedule. Much like Fast Sunday makes us remember the plight of people who don't have food (insofar as you can really feel their pain when you know you've got squash, kiwis, and leftover Thai curry in the fridge at home), working three-quarters time is really bringing home to me the anguish of everyone who works a full-time job. (Insofar as I can really feel your pain when I know I'll be working ten hours a week for the rest of the summer after July 10th.)

But, all you poor nine-to-five employees, on the upside: You probably have health insurance. I, on the other hand, can't go to the dentist for at least the next four years.

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two-step program

1. Read this review.

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2. Buy my book.

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p.s. okay, it's ALL of our book. commies.

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