if you didn't watch the state of the union

i recommend this video here. it's a Q&A session between president obama and the republican house, and the questions are quite direct.

in our teacher training, we talk about what ideologies we bring into the classroom--how we potentially bias our students through the penetration of our own beliefs--and i'll admit, my bias is for critical thinking and open (genuine) dialogue. and i don't feel bad about that.

hope

i saw an exhibit today commemorating sadako sasaki, the girl of the thousand paper cranes. maybe you've heard of her. at twelve years old, she died from leukemia caused by the fallout of the hiroshima bombing ten years earlier.

she believed that if she made a thousand cranes, she would be healed.

the exhibit plaque said, "but her hope was in vain."

i don't agree.

she's not funny.

i had the realization today, for the thousandth time, that my potential to be really really funny is naturally limited by the fact that i'm a female. this is disappointing. (although if i was a man and i wasn't funny, what excuse could i give? i love having caps on my potential: removes so much pressure.)

i first learned this truth in fifth grade, when three of the most popular boys in school dressed up as girls for halloween. they were way funnier than any real girls i've ever met.

i learned this again during every high school assembly i ever attended.

i learned this again from tv (so educational),

and again today, while on a ski lift, at a birthday party, and sledding.

i would suggest that men only seem funnier than women because women are more generous with their laughter, but that doesn't explain why so many men find men funnier than women too, though that could simply be attributed to solidarity and gender arrogance. kind of like how a lot of men prefer listening to male singers rather than female singers.

there is nothing worse than watching a man try to be funny and fail except for watching a woman try to be funny and fail (this post is not intended as an object lesson.) i know there are funny females out there, even among us, but it's not the same. i'm sorry. i'm sorry for both of us.

ps how many conversations have you had trying to identify the funniest females, famous or otherwise? this is a semi-annual conversation for me, which i'm considering abandoning since the results are always so depressing.

obama musical

my roommate showed me the following clip of a musical about Obama that premiered in Germany last week. doesn't it look soooo good? i'm shocked there isn't more of an audience for this in me, musical lover that i am, but i'd rather watch 'april ann' at HCT over and over and over than see this show. (p.s. april ann is the really hokey but awesome musical i saw last night.)
and it's even better than it looks: "Hope is being billed as an interactive musical. Hutchins says that seats in the concert hall will be fitted out with a special percussion kit invented by the show's producers. "The audience will actually play along with us during certain songs," he says. "It'll be like thousands of people sitting on these things, drumming together."" (read the article here) doesn't that sound like fun?

you may say i'm a dreamer, but i'm not the only one

today is a day to celebrate dreams.

sometimes i have a hard time believing in the world. i get microscopic glimpses of the pain and trouble that so many face (often because of the circumstances they are born to), and then i feel overwhelmed by the complexity of solving the problems that cause this pain. like most people lately, i've had haiti on my mind. more accurately, i've had haiti blowing my mind. i want to help. i want to contribute. and i don't want to just make an electronic transaction of funds and feel like my job is done.

i am learning much from the intersection of martin luther king day and the earthquake in haiti. i learned today, for example, that the core of mlk jr's message was aimed at eliminating poverty. (read here for more on the complexity in haiti, esp. as relates to poverty.)

"We are still called upon to give aid to the beggar who finds himself in misery and agony on life's highway. But one day, we must ask the question of whether an edifice which produces beggars must not be restructured and refurbished. That is where we are now." (mlk jr.)

i feel a lot of confusion and ambivalence about what i can do in the world because i want to be efficient, effective, and personal. usually, my retreat position is "serve locally," but i'm learning how little i know about my community, particularly the needs of specific people. and i don't want to just reframe my existing interactions as service.

"For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?" (Matthew 5:46)

"Man's inhumanity to man is not only perpetrated by the actions of those who are bad. It is also perpetrated by the inaction of those who are good." (mlk jr.)

i'm looking to expand my sphere. any ideas?

here are specific things i've learned from martin luther king jr. today:

we need each other. we need the combined experience, wisdom, and love of a whole planet working to relieve the suffering of our brothers and sisters.

we need dreamers with vision and integrity who remind us that seemingly impossible goals still deserve the dedication of a life.

"I guess one of the great agonies in life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable. And so we find ourselves in so many instances having to face the fact that our dreams are not fulfilled." (mlk jr.)

love is always a worthy cause.

sometimes i wonder who i would've been fifty years ago. what side of the lines would i have stood on, and would i have helped to rub those lines away? it is easy for me to praise great courage with hindsight in my favor, but would i have seen things so clearly then?

i hope so. i wonder what i'm not seeing today, what challenges i balk at, and what opportunities to help those around me i pass by.

i believe in a future that is better than the past.

(if you want to read something good about remembering mlk day, go here)

a january gift.

here is one of my favorite songs of all time. (both of all my time and of all musical time, though i don't know much about all musical time.) it is kind of long, but so so good that i hope you'll watch it. it's a section from rachmaninov's "rhapsody on a theme of paganini," and when i saw it at the utah symphony a few years back-- when the orchestra stopped and the piano came in alone-- when i figure out words for how it made me feel, i'll share them.

surrogates

i've been having another one of those blog crises. not the kind where i don't have anything to write, but the kind where i saw julie & julia over the break and found julie so annoying especially regarding her blog that i couldn't bear the thought of posting on this old self-absorbed thing.

sadly, my troubles go deeper than this blog, since i'm making nonfiction my educational pursuit (that is a deliberate phrase, because i'm not willing to commit to anything past 6 months right now.) but i have to remind myself that the essays i love to read and aspire to write are not self-absorbed. they are the kind of essays that blow your mind wide open to a view of the universe and help you see your smallness and your significance at the very same time.

"so," perhaps you ask, "why are you back?" (not like i even took a break, just experienced lots of inner turmoil.)

i'm back mostly because i really like to write but my hands start to seize and shake when i try to "write" anything for school. and because a few years of blogging have made me incapable of expressing meaningful things in person, so if i stop now, my relationships might shrivel up and die like our old resurrection plant that went limp every saturday and revived every sunday. (not on it's own; it was the old "just add water" trick. we could never remember to water a living plant. there's probably a metaphor there but you have to shape it yourself.) and now, i'm going to overwhelm you with words as proof of my new resolve.

anyway, i do have things on my mind, but they are a little dreary (aka personal and about death), so be warned. i had another dream about mom last night and she gave me a good long hug. in the dream, i thought, "this is just like when we hugged goodbye before she died," except that we never hugged goodbye in real life because that's not really how it goes when people die. but wouldn't that be crazy?! what if death was more like it is in the giver-- a big celebration and then taking a different door than everyone else when the party is over--what if there was a moment where you'd say, "i'm going now. goodbye."? i guess it is more like that for some people than it was for mom, but it's certainly less like that for others who die without any warning. it would be much less sad if you could have a good hug and wave as someone passed through a door. as it is, there's the finality of a lifeless body returning your wave. and even for someone who believes fully in the nevertheless of the resurrection as a principle (“For I know that ye have searched much, many of you, to know of things to come; wherefore I know that ye know that our flesh must waste away and die; nevertheless, in our bodies we shall see God.” --2 Nephi 9:4) it still takes a whole heap of faith to factor that principle into reality when death is so persuasively permanent.

this all leads to my point: i know i still have a mother. but how do i experience her mothering while she's not around? so many of the quintessential "mother" acts are physical, sensory, tangible: hugs, phone calls, meals, babysitting your kids, a body sitting in the audience of your main events and going for ice cream after, etc. it's not that i can't see her influence in my life, nor is it about living to make her proud of me: it's about mothers being "there" for you in a "i know where to go to find you when i need you" sort of way. maybe i just have this essay on my brain.

while i try to figure all this out, i've seen surrogate mothers appear all around me and it has been one of the profoundly beautiful experiences of my life. these women have always been nearby, but in the past few years, they've seemed to sense when and how i've needed a little more: someone at my college graduation, someone taking me to lunch, someone to sit with in church, someone to call while i'm walking home from school, someone opening her home at all hours, someone to go shopping with, someone talking me through the mystery of love, someones to make christmas happen, someones trying to steady my boat because even though we all lost they still manage to reach out to me.

to my older sisters (you too d)
to my aunts
to my grandmothers
to mom's cousins
to mom's friends
to the women in my ward
to my cousins
to my friends

thank you for filling the space with love.