Alone and Unobserved

From John (of Mind on Fire):

“Just because you were tagged, you so do not need to follow this. I am interested to see what books you all come up with, though.

“Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Copy the instructions into your own note, and be sure to tag the person who tagged you.”

I was tagged (on Facebook) by Chandelle of Conscious Intention.

• Tender Morsels, by Margo Lanagan
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
• Swordspoint, by Ellen Kushner
• The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson
• Se questo è un uomo, by Primo Levi
• The Dosadi Experiment, by Frank Herbert
• Troll: A Love Story, by Joanna Sinisalo
• The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
• Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
• Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman
• The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
• The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
• The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson
• Huis clos, by Jean-Paul Sartre

I’m going to tag Craig of yes, I am, Miss Nem of Voice of Reason, chosha of a little east of reality, alea at All My Gettings, Petullant at a girl who wears glasses, Kerry at Windmill Watching, and anyone else who wants to play. I’m also gonna tag a few people on Facebook, I think.

If you want to play, either post your own fifteen books in the comments here, or post them on your own blog and leave a comment here with the link. There’s also my Facebook Note. It’s fun!

Sat down in the stylist’s chair on Friday and asked for something different. After a bit of discussion, two pots of color and a lot of razorwork, this is the result.

Last night Craig and I had our Winter Solstice Party. Sorry there are no pictures. You’ll just have to take my word for it that it was lots of fun. Gallons of eggnog and mulled wine and cider and punch were made and consumed. Cheeses of all descriptions were devoured. Bacon-wrapped water chestnuts were also featured. And of course batch after batch of holiday cookies and treats.

There are lots of leftovers. My coworkers are about to receive a bonanza in the form of cookies, bars, cake, tarts and such. Lucky them!

Craig’s birthday was yesterday, so Sunday we went out and go our eyebrows pierced.

Sunday night we had a Wonderfalls marathon. I love Wonderfalls. I think that has been firmly established on this blog. And now Craig loves it, too! I love infecting others with my media addictions. That is why I am a librarian.

The Wonderfalls Cast

Yesterday, Craig and I went to The Happy Sumo for sushi, and I had a delicious—to die for—veggie tempura roll with avocado, sriracha sauce and fresh mayonnaise. OMG so delicious.

Then we went back to my place and finished watching Wonderfalls (see above), drank a bottle of dry Riesling and downed several cups of sambuca. Liquorice-flavored magic!

Happy birthday yesterday, Craig! I hope you had as good a time as I did. (I also hope you aren’t suffering from a sambuca-induced hangover the way I am.)

That I’m in contact with any of my old friends is a miracle—specifically a Facebook miracle. It’s thanks to Facebook that I’m still in touch with former roommates, former BYU friends, former dance partners, former fellow grad students, former coworkers, former professors and former boyfriends, as well as cousins, aunts, online acquaintances, fellow atheists, fellow ex-Mormons, fellow gays and so on and so forth.

I’m beginning to wonder if this is really a good thing. I just lost a friend, primarily because of what each of us has posted openly online (see the comments on this post). She is a practicing, faithful Mormon who supported Prop 8 and who opposes same-sex marriage because she believes homosexual sex is a sin. In fact, like many other Mormons and many fundamentalist Christians, she doesn’t even believe homosexuality exists, per se. She has written a great deal about her views on her blog.

I, on the other hand, am a confirmed atheist ex-Mormon gay man who believes the Mormon church is a man-made organization that is characterized by bigotry, lies and self-righteousness. I believe Proposition 8 was motivated by intolerance and deception and homophobia, and that the Mormon church bears a great deal of the blame for its passing. Just last weekend I participated in a protest against the Mormon church’s opposition to gay rights and support of Prop 8. I have also made no secret of any of these things on my blog.

So she found my blog and was horrified and upset by what she found here, and I found her blog and was horrified and upset in my turn. I wrote a blog post in which I speculated cynically about the true reasons behind the Mormon church and its members’ opposition to gay marriage. She wrote a hurtful comment in response, in which she questioned my integrity and called me bitter and closed-minded. I wrote a cold rebuttal, which I closed by stating that I didn’t feel much friendship for her anymore. She agreed.

Are there some former acquaintanceships that are worth preserving, at least for nostalgia’s sake, but which are too fragile to handle the constant barrage of truth and stream-of-consciousness honesty that accompany an online relationship? Would Summer and I still consider ourselves “friends” if neither of us had a blog and neither of us was on Facebook? Is it possible to preserve a friendship by willfully refusing to know the truth about another person?

Just a few years ago, Summer’s devotion to the Mormon church and opposition to same-sex marriage would have been things we had in common, not things that drove us apart or set us at odds. People change. Our ideas of what friendship is also change.

And then there is my family. I don’t really discuss these subjects with them, but I’m Facebook friends with several of my siblings, and I’ve seen their status updates and the causes they’ve joined. And I’m sure they’ve seen my statuses and notes and causes. How is it possible to preserve a relationship, knowing what we know about each other?

My online friend Misty (Hi, Misty!) introduced me to DailyLit a week or so ago, and since then I’ve been soaking up Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, delivered via RSS feed in easily digestible chunks to my Google Reader inbox every morning. This is obviously a sign of things to come: books will soon go the way of the dodo and everyone will read only ebooks or e-audiobooks. Libraries will be a thing of the past, but I won’t mind, or even notice, because I will be in my living room, taking in information through a cannula wired into my skull. NO ONE WILL EVER LEAVE THEIR HOUSE AGAIN.

Well, I don’t really believe that. But DailyLit is still a nice way to fit classic, open-domain literature into my day. I can even read it on my phone, on the go. (Maybe that cannula really isn’t that far off after all.) Thanks, Misty!

I just watched the best Doctor Who ever, where the Doctor inadvertently becomes Madame de Pompadour’s lifelong protector, secret friend and secret love, all over the course of a single episode. It was fantastic. I think David Tennant is a fine Doctor after all, despite my initial nostalgia for Christopher Eccleston, and the second series is actually better than the first. I know, it sounds impossible! But it’s true.

Last Friday, due to poor planning on my part, I found myself in a truly unfortunate situation: I was alone in the middle of downtown Salt Lake City, a long-ish journey on TRAX ahead of me, and I had forgotten to put a book in my backpack. As I contemplated the endless, dreary minutes of public transportation that stretched before me, without hope even of a magazine to keep me company, I looked up and saw my salvation: Sam Weller’s Zion Bookstore.

I hadn’t been in a real, live bookstore in quite some time, partly because I work in a library and get to read for free, and partly because I’m lazy and Amazon.com is just a click away. But I’ve always wanted to visit the celebrated Zion Bookstore, and that seemed like the perfect opportunity. Despite the name, this is no Deseret Book; Sam Weller’s does have a large selection of LDS titles, but it rises above that to be a full-service bookstore in the old tradition.

As soon as I stepped in, I knew I was in the right place. The walls are lined floor to ceiling with books—new titles, first editions and rarities—with those cool rolling ladders to provide access to the higher shelves. The air is redolent of paper and coffee. The staff is helpful, friendly and knowledgeable. After the bookless wasteland of the train platform, it was like coming home.

An hour later, I left the store with two books I didn’t know I wanted but had to have as soon as I saw them. Today I went back and got a third. This “paying for books” habit might get expensive fast, especially with the way I read.

[This post is dedicated to a certain private bookseller, whose head will explode when she reads my confession about Amazon.com, and whose Breaking Dawn release party is coming up on August 1, if y'all are anywhere near Easley, SC.]

Gay men in America are kind of messed up. We grow up in a society that denies us (or would like to deny us) the natural milestones of young love and courtship. We are fed years of misinformation about our identities, and we lack positive gay role models to combat this misinformation. Our relationships are ignored, ridiculed or vilified, and most of us have no or limited marriage rights (except if we want to ruin the life of some nice woman and, potentially, our innocent children). There are even fewer role models for gay marriages, and so far the majority of gay nuptials have involved those thirty and over.

So it is wonderful, wonderful, I say, to read an article like Benoit Dezinet-Lewis’s NY Times piece on marriage among 20-something gay men in Massachusetts. As one of the subjects of the article says, “I sort of feel like we’re on this island out here by ourselves. . . . That’s probably the biggest difference between us and straight married couples. They see other married people like them everywhere. We don’t.” The young couples in the article are perhaps not the best role models for gay marriage (two of the interviewees are already divorced), but they put a welcome face on committed gay relationships.

The Dezinet-Lewis article is already being blogged about, including a post from my friend Craig. What do you think about the article?

At a friend’s request, I’ve finally sat down and tried to create order out of the chaos that is my recipe for strawberry tiramisù. If you take a look at the original version on the Heavenly Tiramisu website, you will see immediately why it wasn’t much use to anyone else: the only ingredient accompanied by an actual measurement is the whipping cream (“two pints”), there is no amount specified for the sugar, and the cook is simply enjoined to use “lots” of strawberries, ladyfingers and mascarpone cheese.

I hope the new recipe is easier to follow, even though I did my usual thing of wanting to include EVERY POSSIBLE VARIATION IN THE WORLD.

New Recipe: Tiramisù alle Fragole (Strawberry Tiramisù)

My friend Craig recently posted an announcement on his blog to the effect that he had officially resigned from the Mormon church, provoking an anonymous non-Mormon to ask,

Why do Mormons have to resign from the church? Most other Christians (and other religions too) simply stop going when they decide they don’t want to any more.

Good question. The answer: simply not going back to church is immensely popular among lapsed Mormons, as anyone who has compared the attendance statistics of a Mormon congregation with its supposed membership numbers can tell you. Some of these people may still consider themselves Mormon; many do not. But in any case, they don’t resign.

Why? Well, a lot of them don’t know it’s an option—the emphasis among the hordes of Mormons who visit, plead with and harass them is getting them to come back to church, not explaining how they can get Mormonism out of their lives forever. On top of that, resignation is a hassle. A letter has to be written, signed and sent; the bishop has to review it and respond; the stake president has to approve it; and Mormon church headquarters has to finalize it. (Yes, legally you’ve resigned once you notify any church representative of your intention in writing, but in practice the Mormon church drags it out quite a bit longer than that.) A lot of them don’t care enough about NO LONGER BEING MORMON to go through with it. And finally, some ex-Mormons don’t want to legitimize the authority their former faith claims over them by “requesting to have their name removed” from the rolls of the church.

So, that’s why people don’t officially resign their membership. What are some reasons why they do?

Well, in my case, I had just spent four years at BYU, where I not only had to pretend to be straight when I wasn’t but had to (for the last two years) pretend I was a faithful, believing Mormon, when I wasn’t. Couple that with the fact that I was by then a fairly staunch atheist who found the idea of being claimed by ANY religion abhorrent and repugnant, and I don’t think it’s at all surprising that I sent in my resignation letter as soon as my BYU diploma was in my hands.

Craig, on the other hand, left Mormonism (by his own account) principally “because [he] fundamentally disagree[s] with the church’s stance and policies relating to homosexuality and gender identity.” He still believes in God, and he hasn’t necessarily stopped believing in the Mormon gospel, just in the way it is being taught and interpreted in the Mormon church at the moment (see this post for his current stance).

Then there are all the people who find out about some unsavory bit of Mormon history or doctrine (of which there is not a little), and are so enraged/repulsed/ashamed that they decide to resign. Or those (like the Danzigs) who resign rather than be excommunicated/disciplined. Or those who are so freaking sick of having to throw home teachers, visiting teachers and/or Mormon missionaries off their porch every week that they finally get up, go to their window, and scream, “I’M MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!” And then they resign.

I was recently tagged by Craig. The rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book (at least 123 pages).
2. Turn to page 123.
3. Find the 5th sentence.
4. Post the 5th sentence on your blog.
5. Tag 5 people.

Of course, since I’m in a library, the nearest book would be La Gran Enciclopedia de los Insectos.

Familia Limnephilidae: Extensa familia que comprende a la vez insectos de grandes y pequeñas dimensiones, con las alas generalmente ahumadas, sin manchas distintivas, pero con largas antenas filiformes.

I don’t think I’ll tag anyone specific this time around, but if you are reading this and are interested in participating, feel free to claim that I tagged you.