Suboptimist
I’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.

We’re not kidding when we say that Facebook has turned into I-just-found-out-my-friend-is-married-book. Those of us who have grown up in Utah experience the shock more often, I would assume, as Utah is the land of the young happy couples. Not that I am necessarily against it, but it is always really weird to see an old female friend’s profile, but not recognize the last name. Oh, and this isn’t just a Mormon thing. Maybe the high Mormon population influences it, but young marriage here runs across the religious divide. Maybe it unites us.

Anyway, anyone who knows me is probably aware that I have been fixin’ to purchase a motorcycle in the near future. I’ve always wanted one, and upon turning 21 in June, there really isn’t anything anybody can do to stop me from doing it. A motorcycle may be just what I need to firmly establish my new-found boldness. I have found that there are various kinds of motorcycles available to choose from. Here are some possibilities:

· Harley Davidson Sportster. Don’t get me wrong, this is a nifty-looking piece of machinery, and despite my new-found boldness, this bike doesn’t fit my personality at all. I can’t see myself cruising down the boulevard in leather fringe, a mustache and a leather du-rag while listening to Steve Miller. Moving on…

· Kawasaki Ninja. Again, it’s a nice piece of equipment, but the crotch-rocket thing fits me worse than the chopper does. While I’ve met some mean sons-of-bitches who ride choppers, most I’ve met have been likeable, kind human beings. I have never met a guy who rides a bullet-bike that hasn’t been a prick. I also hate the way people ride them. You know, the body armor on the torso, but wearing shorts and a backwards baseball cap. Man, I hate that.

· Honda Gold Wing. I can see how riding a bike that has everything you need (CD player, cup-holder, luggage rack) can be attractive, but I’m not a retiree with a trophy wife. Next.

· 1978 BMW R100. This is the bike for me, assuming you strip off all that added crap like the windshield. Actually, what I want is the R90, which has the power to take me on the highway and looks to lure countless women to ride in the sidecar I intend to purchase with it. I’ll probably put a dog in the sidecar too. The R90 is a classic bike with a classic look, though one question remains…could I handle 900cc-1000cc? I don’t know.

I swear the office is 50-degrees today.

Good news everyone, I have something new to be annoyed by.

First of all my faithful reader(s) should note that I am either a feminist or at least sympathetic to feminism, however something happened today that almost made me want to go home and brood while listening to one of the Reverend’s misogyny mixes. For the first time in my life, I came upon an idiosyncratic spelling of women. It was spelled womyn.

This is one of many alternative spellings employed by some more radical feminists, others include femal < female and humyn < human, etc., and I find it really irritating. The intention of these spellings is supposedly to fight back the subordination of women through language containing words like “-man/-men,” i.e., classifying women as a subset of men. That’s not what these words do. It’s a complete, unadulterated accident that woman bears any similarity to man and female bears any similarity to male, and so forth. Woman comes from O.E. wimman < wifman, which was a compound of wif ‘woman’ and man ‘person’ (the word for man was originally wer). Female comes from Latin femella ‘woman’ and male comes from Latin masculis ‘man.’ Human from Latin hominis ‘human.’ Oh dear, what’s a gyrl to do against facts like these…

A couple more points: let’s pretend that the above words were coined with the intention to subordinate women. In that case, changing the spelling wouldn’t do anything, since we would still pronounce the words the same way — the root remains the same. This is just a ridiculous attempt at pop-Whorfianism, trying to remove grammatical gender in order to liberate women. If you don’t know how the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis works, don’t cite it. Oh, and did you know that Farsi (spoken in Iran) lacks grammatical gender? Women there are the most liberated on the planet.

Anyway, my summer is looking pretty decent, though it’s getting kind of busy all of the sudden. I am trying to get some Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac work in on the weekends, and I started reading The Lord of the Rings again. P.S. Only a few people will understand why this is funny (ZOMG mage nerf!)

Dan’s blog is down, so I am submitting this Final Fantasy 11 experience for him. We often exchange interesting stories about our experiences in the virtual world. Here we go:

So I have this FFXI friend, a mithra [a feminine race in the Final Fantasy universe] actually played by a woman. She’s just a level or two ahead of me, so we’re in the same range to party together for experience. She’s a dark knight, a DD, so the party invites aren’t always very common…and so she often asks (well, tells) me to organize a party so she doesn’t have to find a tank. Tonight I actually wanted to party, so I went ahead and organized a group with her help. It was a good party, I dinged to 69, and we played for two, maybe three hours (I’m sure you know how easy it is to lose track of time).

Anyway, sort of toward the end I sent her a /tell commenting on how rare and nice it is when the same group of people sticks together for as long as we did. She agreed, adding, “especially for a Saturday night.” I said fortunately I don’t have much of a social life and she asked if I wanted hers. I said I’d take part of it and she said I probably wouldn’t want it because it pretty much consists of guys hitting on her. I gave a modest laugh, something like a “Heh,” more as an interjection than because I actually thought it was funny. Seeing that she wasn’t offended, I facetiously asked, “Why, are you hot?”

She laughed and said it was a funny question and she didn’t know how to answer it and she asked what I considered hot and seemed to be enjoying herself and so I kept joking around along the same lines and before long she got all serious. She said my original question (about being hot) was tasteless and immature. Well, at first I was pretty sure she was overreacting a la Marquette, but after further criticism (as with any argument with a girl in which I’m not necessarily wrong), I started to feel bad and apologized profusely.

It felt very strange because I was still playing the game while talking to her. In other words, my character was defending her while I was defending myself FROM her. It was one of those kinda rare instances when we both looked past the characters on the screen and were communicating with each other. And I couldn’t believe how much I wanted to preserve my relationship with her, as much as I would with any friend I’d known since last September or whatever. It was also ironic because I usually enjoy being free of that kind of drama when I play video games.

Anyway, we finished the party and everyone left except us. If you open the attached image [below] you can see us standing at a confrontational distance. We were there, in that exact position, for literally 10 minutes arguing. Just as if it’d happened in person, I was terrified of moving my character a single step. I actually started laughing at how ridiculous the whole thing was. It was one of the most uncomfortable moments of my life and it didn’t even happen in “real life.”

We may submit this to the Daedalus Project.

Yes. This is what I’ve been doing at work.

EDIT: If you’re unsure where this comes from, check the last paragraph of my previous entry.

I finally got to watch the Frontline documentary The Mormons (I was too busy to watch it when it first aired two weeks ago). I was reasonably impressed with it. It seemed to attempt a fair portrayal, covering the history and culture and interviewing the rank and file and the dissidents. My one complaint was that it didn’t cover early Mormonism’s connections to Freemasonry. Surely that would have been relevant, either in the section on Joseph Smith, Mormon beginnings, or the temple ceremonies. Perhaps it would have taken too much time.

I discussed the documentary with a friend of mine. He asked how I felt about Mormonism, having been raised a Latter-day Saint, growing up in the culture, and being inactive (a term frequently applied to those who do not attend LDS meetings). What can be said is that I have had little exposure to Mormonism as it exists outside of Utah, the sole exceptions being visits to family in Seattle and Minneapolis and the summer I spent with a small group of Jordanian Mormons. Thus, what I can say about my feelings toward LDS culture is limited. I believe the culture is different here since Mormons comprise the majority religious group. This is probably the reason many Utahans identify themselves as being either Mormon or non-Mormon, an aspect of Utah may lead to my ultimate demise. Concerning Utah Mormon culture specifically, it’s can be a little irritating at times, but it’s not as bad as people think. It would be the same with any religious majority (even a non-religious majority).

As per Mormon doctrine and history, it’s a mixed bag for me. Do I believe Joseph Smith was a prophet? No, at least not in the commonly understood meaning of the term. Do I believe Joseph Smith was a fraud? Again, no. I think he was a sincere religious founder. Charlatan? All religious founders (including businessmen, scholars, anyone who has to use persuasions regularly) has to have a little bit of that in him, but I don’t believe Smith was trying to mislead people. Do I believe the Book of Mormon documents the pre-Columbian Americas? No, in fact Joseph Smith listed himself as the ‘Author and Proprietor’ of the first edition. Do I like some of the things Smith did? Yes. I’ll leave it at that.

Do I like Brigham Young? Not particularly. I think he was a dictator, a racist, and a philanderer. While Joseph Smith appointed a black man, Elijah Abel, to hold the priesthood office of Seventy, Young insisted that black men could not hold the priesthood, saying the only reason the ‘Negro race’ survived the flood was so Satan could maintain his presence on earth. He also called slavery a divine institution. I do, however, like the fact that he basically told American to f*** itself when he moved the early Saints west. That is certainly admirable.

Do I believe the Church is the only way to God? No. Do I believe it is one of many ways to God? Yes, the same way I believe Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism, etc. are ways to God or whatever supreme entity is there. I believe the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a positive influence in the lives of millions of its members. That is something I will never deny. For me, however, it isn’t what it claims to be. I have to take a different path. So the final question is whether I consider myself ‘Mormon.’ The answer is yes, the same way a Jew can be a Jew while practicing Buddhism. I was raised Mormon, I come from pioneer stock on my mother’s side, my family is Mormon, and it will always be part of me and something I will never deny. Am I a Latter-day Saint? No, at least I can’t call myself one.

In other news, to break the awkward silence that may be permeating the area around your computer right now, I am sick of how the people leading us in this war the US is engaged in can’t pronounce the name of the country we are occupying. It isn’t iRaq, it’s Iraq. Get it right, n00bs. I heard an NPR interview the other day with a guy talking about how difficult it is to find insurgents from helicopters, because iRaq is nothing but palm trees, palm tree farms and sand. Jeez, people. Get with it.

Nation Sickened By Sight Of Happy Young Couple

WASHINGTON, DC—Three states have already passed “Get A Room” ordinances to combat the Oak Park, IL couple’s playful nudging and incessant hand-holding.

GRRR.

“The cacophony of groans, boos and applause echoing inside the University of Utah’s Kingsbury Hall was as divided as the men and their politics reverberating on stage,” read the opening line of the Salt Lake Tribune’s article covering the recent debate between Sean Hannity and Salt Lake mayor Rocky “America’s mayor” Anderson. Now, I use the word “debate” loosely, since this was a debate in the same way professional wrestling is a sport, in that it wasn’t a debate at all, really. After all, the Trib sent its theater critic to cover the event. A friend of mine (who shouldn’t have attended to debate in the first place) told me she never felt so embarrassed to be from Salt Lake City, and how she assumed everybody there had been raised in a barn. I don’t know if it was really that bad, I don’t really think the debate was as good for the public discourse as some made it out to be. If you attended the event, you were not helping anything, but you were aiding and abetting a fight.

On wholly unrelated note, this has been bothering me for some time: graffiti on bathroom walls, pee on the seats, and purposeful clogging of public toilets. I see this a lot in the restrooms at the University of Utah. This amazes me. Did high-school freshman start attending the university? I would assume that we had outgrown the stage in our lives when we found stuffing a toilet with the fecal mass of five human bowel movements and an entire roll of toilet paper humorous, an act many of us probably never found amusing in the first place. Let’s restore civility to the campus. While we’re at it, let’s bring back tweed, hats, canes, umbrellas, and smoking pipes. That’s my ideal campus.

This is the first Sunday in a long while when I have been under no obligation to do anything. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself, and obviously promptly updating my blog was did not cross my mind. I decided to clean out my car a little (since I’ve been living in it the last 3 weeks), I intended to vacuum my room, but didn’t, and I read a book in the park. It was a very relaxing Sunday.

I already received an A in historical linguistics. I am expecting the same grade in phonology, structure of Arabic, Shi`ism, and an A- in my remaining two classes. On the whole, it was a very successful semester. I would like to post a couple of the papers I wrote in the near future. But until then…blogthings. Stay tuned for a more substantial update tomorrow.

You Are 52% A Child of the 80s

Back in the day, you were totally 80s. Tubular, totally tubular.

I am done with the semester now.  I will be bringing regular posts soon.  However, this is all I have to post now:

Curiosity n. : a state in which you want to learn more about something.

Idle adj. : not in action or at work; “an idle laborer”; “idle drifters”; “the idle rich”; “an idle mind”;