Results of Ruminations

When a youth from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints decides to volunteer for an eighteen- to twenty-four month mission, said youth agrees to abstain from a lot of things that generally comprise the majority of a kid's living experience: No dating, no popular/secular music, no contact with home save emails once a week and a couple of calls, and no watching movies, especially not in the theater. This list of Don't Commandments is designed to strip away the distractions of normal life so that the limited time as a missionary can be focused on the purpose of dedicated missionary life: Preaching the gospel. So it makes sense within the internal logic of the Church's system and it is, for the most part, an effective maneuver that does help keep missionaries honed in on their purpose. The fascinating thing about this forced fast of films is that there's an unspoken but fairly well understood cultural expectation on the other end of the service. Young women (a...

A story of the evolution of a thought, in three parts. I Growing up, I didn't know if I knew anyone who was LGBTQ+. Middle school and high school happened throughout the nineties, and though there was still some AIDS conversations in hushed tones in the hallways at school, the judgment of homosexuality particularly (the rest of the gender and orientation spectrum being even more suppressed than it is now) was somehow tied into the disease. I lived a sheltered life, shared with friends who didn't know much about sexuality--or, if they did, they didn't bring it up around me. This meant that most of my understanding of sexuality and human relationships was narrowly confined. I remember the first time my mom explained how gays have sex, and the disgust and disdain in her voice still echoes.* I don't know what inspired it, or if there's another way of reading that conversation. It was long ago, and I daresay that I may have misremembered what was said. Neverthele...

I'm listening to the notes from Lin-Manuel Miranda about Hamilton . It's really enjoyable and frustrating at the same time, as he's reading his notes aloud. There isn't always context, since the note comes from a piece of the musical that he's talking about. Once, he said, "This can be applied to modern politics." What does this  mean? No idea. But Miranda is a really engaging, interesting, brilliant (and I mean that) person, so I don't want to stop listening to his thoughts, even though they're incomplete. One of the things he talked about, though, was how a song came to him. He was riding through New York City (in a more detailed route than I'm going for here), taking the A-Train to get to a friend's birthday party. The train commute was long, so he was working on one of the songs that would wind up in Hamilton , only to be so taken in by the process of writing that he ended up only attending the party long enough to drink "half ...

I've lamented before that I feel like I don't know enough. Since I left college, I haven't felt as connected to the intellectual abilities I had started to build during my last year or two. In fact, one of my favorite experiences in all of university was my "Madness in Literature" class. This is one of the reasons that I quickly encourage students to look forward to and anticipate their next step in education. The class involved looking at madness--the way it was portrayed in literature, obviously, but also culturally, historically, and politically. The professor had never taught the course before, as it was a senior seminar, once-in-a-lifetime chance. I would swing by the professor's office to chat with her about ideas I'd had because of the readings, which was unusual for me. I generally let my classwork speak for itself. But there were a couple of professors whose acquaintance I pursued outside of the classroom. I appreciated Dr. Albrecht-Crane's ...