Can you fast for inappropriate things?

Hoo Boy. So I got a chain email asking for all Mormons around the country to fast for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.

Straight off of reading it I felt as if my religion was being used as propaganda against me. "C'mon you're a Mormon so obviously you want a Mormon as POTUS and it would be the right thing too." I just felt icky and wrong after reading that email.

Though the email did promise If we do all that we can through our hard work and prayers in behalf of Mitt Romney miracles will happen. That made me wonder if the miracle would be a viable candidate would appear who is better than the choices available to us.

On a side note, it would be amusing if Mitt were elected and Harry retained his position as senate majority leader. Then the world could see two Mormons in political contention one with another. That, I think, would help the world at large realize that we Mormons are everyday people.

Oh, and by the way, this attempt to use the church to endorse a candidate goes against the policy of the LDS church itself.

And another post-script. I have yet to make up my mind in this election. I hear so much from both campaigns about why I shouldn't vote for the other guy but not so much why I should vote for their guy.

Fact of the Day : Pepsi

Pepsico only draws 37% of its revenue from beverages.  Also the very first version of Pepsi was called Brad's Drink.

Fact of the Day

Fireflies are in fact beetles and I miss seeing them.

I guess that is two facts......

Nothing much to say here

I try whenever I post to give something worthwhile, a bit more than just a travelogue or a journal entry for the day. That is the reason mostly for the lengthy spans between my posts. (I realize my posts are sometimes just that though but I try to limit those posts).  

But I have a lot of pictures to share with you so those will be my next posts. I still have pictures to put up from my sister's visit, and now pictures from my trip to London. I ran away from my dissertation for my head was no longer cooperating with me.  My favourite thing to do not counting the temple was the Phantom of the Opera in a West End Theatre. (Though no theatre experience would be complete without technical difficulties).

I was grateful for a bit of sun and warmth there also, I think it was the first time I had been able to walk around in short sleeves without a coat.

Also speaking of pictures I'll have some for you of my kids I've been working with this past year teaching music. We had our concert which went off well. It was wonderful seeing kids from across the city getting together to create music with one another.

and I'm done rambling for the moment

My DDR Obsession

Oh DDR, we've gone through a lot together. We started off as casual friends; I would come by and visit you in the arcade, we could have one or two dances together and then go on. I knew you weren't a one man kind of girl and I was fine with that then. But then things happened and we started seeing each other near daily. I mean for me it was a necessity, I had to be there with you. I was infatuated. Turned out you were only using me for my money, that was hard to deal with but as we talked I realized I may have been using you for weightloss for me. We both were kinda selfish about the relationship.

But we couldn't see how to move on from each other so we decided to move in together. What a mistake that was. I thought I was obsessed before and now you were here in my house. I didn't have to go anywhere to see you and didn't have to pay for each and every use (just one big payment to begin with). Oh we had some good times together, I learned whole new genres of music from you. We would have friends over and share in mutual merriment. Oh we were good together. So good that I was actually skinny again, didn't worry as much about my weight in general. You helped me realize I needed more than just exercise that good food was necessary too. I learned a lot from you but then you stopped trying, you didn't really grow at all and then you started listening to American Pop, that was a killer. It wasn't that we left one another, just that we drifted apart our separate ways.

 It had been years and we had each moved on. I was all academic and that nonsense, you went back to your anime roots and got some new skins. It was good to be independent, I thought I was free of your grasp. But then you saw me across the room, I didn't know you were gonna be there. You started blaring out songs from our good times together just to get my attention, oh you were a sly one. Unable to resist I came over and watched you spend time with some of your newer friends. I saw your makeover you put yourself through. I thought maybe something quick would be alright, a simple song from the past together for a quick dance just for old time sakes.

 BAHAHAHAHAHA I so should have known you would put your tendrils around me and suck me in. You knew I missed you, you manipulative tramp. You knew I would come around for a look, and then a dance, and then I'd be yours. Oh you are a trickster. We had hours together again and at the time they were good, oh to be fair not as good as our time together before, only 6-7/10 rather than the 9-10/10 that we had before. I think we need to spend a lot of time away from one another to recover.

EFY

Soooo, those of you in Utah who are all for EFY and were counselors and tried to get me to join in that pursuit will remember my vehement opposition to joining as a counselor.  Well you can laugh at me now since I received a call from my Stake Presidency assigning me to be a counselor for the Ireland EFY. I'm just brimming with excitement..... I tried the argument of having a masters dissertation due 10 days later from the date of the shindig but he wasn't taking no for an answer. Well, it will be an experience.

Oh, I had to turn in a photo to them so they would know what I looked like. I may have considered sending in my Disco Night photo with a fully bearded face and curly hair.......

 But I decided since the Stake presidency asked me to do it I wouldn't be terribly light minded about it and so I dug out a neutral photo.

The Visit (teaser)

Kassandra (the sister) and Justin (her spouse) showed up and  we had a grand ol' time. I don't have the time to update on the whole trip but there will be more on it later.

Favorite Quote from the Visit, and yes it is horribly out of context. (KC to Justin) "Ok Justy I would like you to stay straight."

Why Servanthood is Bad

Abraham, the head of a tribe, decided to follow a God who claimed to be the only God. That made Abraham and his people strangers in their own land. They journeyed as strangers through the world. And they developed
some unique ideas about responsibilities to strangers because they were strangers themselves.

Jesus’ disciples were also people who decided to become strangers –– in their own land and in others. They built communities based on their decision. That renewed their understanding of obligations to strangers, and hospitality was renewed.  In every household, in every tent, the door was open –– to the stranger, the
outsider, the enemy, or potential enemy. And the stranger was one with whom one acted, not in service, but equality.

Then a terrible thing happened in third-century Italy. At the side of a monastery, they built a little room for strangers. And they called it a hospice. The church took over responsibility for the stranger. And Christians forgot what had been unique about their community –– how to welcome the person who was outside and hungry.

The hospice hook hospitality out of the community. "Hospice" became "hospital." The hospital became Humana, a for-profit corporation buying up church hospitals. Communities and churches have forgotten about hospitality. Now systems and corporations claim they can produce it and sell it and that you can consume it.

You must struggle with all your might to reclaim the central Christian act of hospitality. You will have to fight your local hospitals. You will have to fight Humana. You will have to fight the social services. They have commodified hospitality and called it a service. They have made a market of the temple. And you know what
you’re supposed to do the money changers: get ‘em out! Or bring into the church the hospitality that is at the center of understanding a relationship as a friend not a servant. A church’s response to people without should be hospitality, not services.



From 'Why Servanthood is Bad'
by John McKnight

Dalai Lama

Every one of us is getting older, which is a natural process. Time is constantly moving on, second by second. Nothing can stop it, but what we can do is use our time properly; that is in our hands. Whether we believe in a spiritual tradition or not, we need to use our time meaningfully. If over days, weeks, months and years, we have used our time in a meaningful way – when our last day comes, we'll be happy, we'll have no regrets.

Lederach

Social change that depends heavily on the magnetic attraction of shared opposition creates social energy that can generate large numbers in discrete time frames but has difficulty sustaining the longer term change. social movements rise and fall as visible moments rather than as sustained processes. This seems related to two important observations about how change happens.

First, social movements find that it is easier, and in many cases more popular, to articulate to what they are opposed rather than what they wish to build. Change is seen linear: Raise awareness first, then promote action by increased numbers of people to stop something, and finally, once that thing is stopped, develop action to build something different. Awareness and action have at times gone together and created extraordinary moments of change -- from local communities of civil and human rights, to nations overthrowing oppressive regimes. It has rather consistently been during the third part of the theory --developing action to build something-- where we run into difficulties and where the change processes seem to collapse.

Second, framing the process as one that must create like-minded communities produces a narrow view of change wherein little thought or work is given to the broader nature of who and what will need to change and how they will be engaged in such a process. In other words, the very way  the issues and process are framed undermines the fundamental web of understanding that change must strategically build linkages and coordination with and across not-like-minded and not-like-situated relational spaces. Unlike a linear change theory, the web approach suggests that multiple processes at different levels and social spaces take place at the same time. The web approach does not think in terms of us versus them, but rather about the nature of the change sought and how multiple sets of interdependent processes will link people and places to move the whole of the system toward those changes. In pragmatic terms the web approach asks early and often: Who has to find a way to be connected to whom?

Nonetheless, there is a certain truth to the frame of reference that convincing large numbers of people to get on board with an idea is the key to social change. Awareness of information and the willingness to act on what one believes are indeed part and parcel of the larger challenge of how societies as a whole change and move toward new ways of relating and organizing their lives together. in settings of protracted conflict and violence, movement away from fear, division, and violence toward new modalities of interaction requires awareness, action, and broad processes of change. In this sense, numbers are important. However, it is equally important for us to look deeper at how we think this shift happens. Numbers count. But experience in settings of deep division suggests that what lies invisible behind the numbers counts more. In social change it is not necessarily the amount of participants that authenticates a social shift. It is the quality of the platform that sustains the shifting process that matters. Ironically, the focus on numbers has created a misunderstanding and misapplication of the concept of critical mass.

Labels

Wayne Dyer once said that the highest form of ignorance is the rejection of a concept about which you know nothing. This resonates within me as I watch people look to labels for recognition as to whether or not an idea is acceptable to them. Rather than research the idea, people will reject it solely on the label: conservative or liberal, Israeli or Palestinian, Christian or Muslim, capitalist or socialist/Marxist/Maoist/Leninist/etc., democrat or republican, nationalist or loyalist......(I think you get my meaning).

Within this labeling there is the misinformed idea of only having two points in the argument so often on will hear that if you don't accept one sides' position that must mean you accept the other side. What a faulty propaganda fear driven notion.  I believe that there are many positions within any argument. And horrors there might even be positions which take ideas from both sides to come up with a solution.

Look for yourself. Find out about the 'other side' but also find out about everything else in between and beyond. Look beyond the pundits for your opinion. Look beyond the labels for your decision.

Just so you know

The more I get to know people out there in the world the more realizations I have about myself and how I just don't seem to fit in with others all that well.  Thanks a lot Parents...... (Not sure yet whether I'm being sarcastic or not)

The picture is from xkcd.com

Scrabo Tower

Went down to Newtonards and climbed up the Scrabo Tower there. It was an amazing view from the top. The sea comes up near to it there. It's quite the view. There was also a good wander through a neighboring grove of trees and some fun scrambling up some rocks there Yay for ward activities.

Should I think this?

Is it awful if I was hoping there would be at least one speaker at General Conference who would make some reference to April Fools?

New Favorite

I think I have come across my new favorite long windedness.  My previous has held the record since I was fifteen.  I thought I would post the both of them. Though maybe I should call them both record holders since they are different mediums, one a play and one a fiction novel.

The Previous Title Holder
Tom from Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie:  
 I'm going to opium dens! Yes, opium dens, dens of vice and criminals' hang-outs, Mother. I've joined the Hogan gang, I'm a hired assassin, I carry a tommy-gun in a violin case! I run a string of cat-houses in the Valley! They call me Killer, Killer Wingfield, I'm leading a double-life, a simple, honest warehouse worker by day, by night, a dynamic czar of the underworld, Mother. I go to gambling casinos, I spin away fortunes on the roulette table! I wear a patch over one eye and a false mustache, sometimes I put on green whiskers. On those occasions they call me--El Diablo! Oh, I could tell you things to make you sleepless! My enemies plan to dynamite this place. They're going to blow us all sky-high some night! I'll be glad, very happy, and so will you! You'll go up, up on a broomstick, over Blue Mountain with seventeen gentlemen callers! You ugly--babbling old--witch. . . .

The Newly Crowned Title Holder
Sam from Neil Gaiman's American Gods
I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too.

I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”

The Mournes

This was the state of Slieve Donard the day I went up for the first time.

The Mountain literally trails off into the ocean

This is a view of the ocean as I leave the treeline

 

Josh and I.  As a side-note you can see 'snow' on the ground.
Thankfully my only experience with that wretched stuff this winter
has been up on this mountain.

Just a fun shot

Another shot of the view

In this shot you can get some sense of the wind up there.
According to the measurements that day gusts were getting up to 85 mph.
At points were were literally being blown while standing still

 

The Silent Treatment

I had the chance to go spend a couple of days at a monastery after the order of St. Benedictine.  The point of this was for self reflection and growth.  The method they encouraged was silence and introspection.  Well everybody there talked and often but that doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile.  Sometimes reflection and growth happen best when bouncing ideas off of other people and getting feedback from them.  I had several good conversations there which were integral to my academic growth.  Randomly the monastery was built in front of a field which had a faery ring in it.  That was cool to go explore.  Also the town which was about four miles of a walk from the monastery had a monument to the general which burnt DC during the War of 1812.  I pretty much had no reaction but I wondered if I should have had some sort of gut wrenching sort of thing.  But the guy was from a gorgeous little village on the sea.

Samson and Goliath

These two cranes dominate the skyline here in East Belfast.
They are called Samson and Goliath.
I'm not much of a photographer but I thought I'd share a shot of them I had with those of you back in the States. The shot also gives an idea of the living quarters in that area. The local culture loves these two cranes. Nearly every art/photography show/shop
will have some interpretation of this.

left cheek: Reconsidering the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven ...

left cheek: Reconsidering the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven ...:

I'm becoming more an more convinced that we do need a revolution, but that it cannot be centered around one person. It should never be centered on one person. We need a revolution of values, as Dr. King said. We need to see in each other infinite worth and value. We need to tuly assess what good we have to share and what assets we have to benefit from. A true revolution will start not by force or coercion or violence, but by the rising up of entire communities that are willing to unplug themselves from the Contemporary Empire System of Exploitation and see themselves as strong cooperatives.

This revolution cannot be forced. It cannot be charged. It must be commonly understood. It must be learned through re-education. Not forceful education. Not the same manipulative education that we have been subjected to under Madison Avenue, our political parties, the news cooperatives, Hollywood, Viacom, Universal, Old White Men. The type of education that forces us to be compliant and do our business in buying and participating in the CESE.

But an education that teaches us the connections and value of our selves, our neighbors, our work, our time, our intelligence and skills, our families, our energy, our earth, our resources, and the value and intricate worth of every other human and non human on the planet.


Go check out the rest of his blog and then the follow up posts.  I have always believed that true revolution will be in the changes away from greed and whatnot.  I remember in a class we were supposed to present on how we would run a political/economic system and my argument was that most any system would work with good people who weren't corrupt and selfish.

Various Murals

Kids

I'm not really a kids person, not that I hate them or can't stand them, but don't make me hang around them for extended periods of time.
At least that was my view previously.
I've been working with kids for months now and it might be starting to affect me.  Wednesday nights I run a drop in at the community center for the 11-14 age group (seems most people here don't know the term 'tween'). Thursday nights I have mutual with the youth in the ward as part of my calling in the YM presidency.  Friday consists of teaching music to a group of 10-15 kids.  My saturdays have started to be hijacked for youth activities and Sundays I have the young men.  So I am around kids a lot now.  Its bearable and sometimes enjoyable.  We'll have to see how it progresses.

Also I'm not a fan of being the authority figure