In this time of Introspection, on the eve of my election:

So first, my blog has become super popular over the last week. Not really, but four separate people commented, which is about even with the comments by people i actually know. I dunno what that means, but it's probably something big.

Anyway, i did manage to pull myself out of the wallow of inaction (evidenced by 3 blog posts in 3 days) and accomplish something. So that felt good, i went swimming, i read most of Ender's Shadow (not quite as good as Ender's Game, because i don't like Bean as much, he's too cold and calculating, but still a fun read) and started reading Crime and Punishment again. I only got to the Crime when i was reading it in highschool. It's still a punishingly slow book, and i can't read more than a chapter unless i've had more than adequate sleep the night before. I've started waking up at 9 in an effort to shift towards the 6:30 alarm i'm looking forward to in 2 weeks (holy crap, 2 weeks). As soon as i manage to work that out (not staying up to blog at 1am will be key) i'll push it back to 8. There's no reason to push any farther than that since with the time zone change i'll be getting up at 7:30 central.

My biggest difficulty with swimming for exercise is my attention span. I have neither the patience nor the personality to swim freestyle slowly for miles (except when it's a race and i'm pacing myself). The best part about swim teams (or any athletic teams really) is you have friends and coaches to motivate you and keep otherwise boring exercise interesting. So i've been swimming 100m I.M.'s to keep things short and interesting. I've been switching the Butterfly out for other strokes some of the time because i'm still really out of shape and don't want to throw up in the nice people's bathroom again. But i figure over the next couple of weeks i'll be able to build it up to 200m IMs, butterfly included, just in time to swear off swimming for two years. I guess in the MTC i'll have to go back to weights. Maybe do a bike machine or something. I have a feeling running would take it out of my legs really fast, my knee still gives me trouble sometime, and my shin feels like it did back when i got shin splints.

Mild pain aside, life continues hurtling forward at a crawl. 2 weeks from now i'll be packed. I don't know how to deal with that. I am sort of accepting the idea of myself going into the MTC. It feels a lot like me going to college. I still have no idea how to feel about it, can't believe i'm really old enough to be doing this, but am expecting it sort of. I don't quite know how to describe it. I never do.

Music is so amazing. Seriously. (I'm listening to The Killers again, Read My Mind to be specific.) Just the way music can not only convey emotions, but actually produce them. What is it that makes songs like this so beautifully perfect? (I originally phrased that as comparison to crap music, but even Brittney Spears, 'nsync, and Creed, the groups that came to mind for crappy music, aren't really that bad, they're just shallow. I can't think of any bands that are really pointless, just a lot of bands i don't like) Music is powerful stuff, more so maybe than any other art form, at least in it's directness. Art can make you think, and sometimes visualize the abstract, theater has a lot of potential for conveying ideas and even draw you in to the emotion of the characters, but music can, within about 5 seconds, create completely real feelings and emotions. (I didn't mention dance. Dance has never done much for me, yeah it's beautiful and impressive, but it always seems that when it comes to conveying things, which i think is what all Art is at it's core, conveying the inexpressible, it's a very convoluted method with definite limitations, and it almost always depends a lot on music. Music can make you want to do stuff, dance, cry, go to war, etc. I have yet to get anything like that from dance, but maybe i've just been going to all the wrong places. In a lot of ways it seems like dance is a combination of music, art, and theater, but without some of the best parts of each. I didn't mention poetry either, but that's good stuff.) Someone should make really really good music for missionaries. My problem with religious music, mainstream Christian music especially is that the thought is good, but the Music and the Lyrics suck. Maybe they don't fit, i dunno. My impression is that most Christian songs are created by picking a absurdly simple thought (God is Good), jazzing it up with a couple of adjectives (God is SO good) and repeat until the song is long enough. Then grab an acoustic guitar, pick three chords, and go nuts! Too much Christian music tries to survive on the fact that it's Christian music alone. It ought to be music first, that just happens to be about Religious themes. I think the real power of music is also drastically under utilized. Religion is full of deep and difficult to express things. Why waste a song on something that can be explained in a sentence? I'm sure there's decent religious music out there, there are a whole bunch of hymns i like a lot, so there's no reason people haven't managed to make decent music about God that isn't in SATB chord structure.

I totally forgot to mention that i played piano for a Funeral last week. Happily, that went a lot better than some of my wedding exploits. (Can a funeral really ever go 'well'? Do you go home saying, that was a great funeral!) It also made me give a lot of thought to being cremated. The thought of being embalmed, sitting in a box slowly rotting, being paraded before all my relatives, and then dropped in the ground where i'll gradually decombone*, not romantically back into the earth, but covered in my own compost, into a zombie like wraith due to the box and all the poison pumped into me. No, fire has a very nice romanticism and purity to it. I think if i could pull it off, floating into the ocean on a pyre that's lit by flaming arrows would be pretty rockin, but i imagine they frown on that these days. Also the whole scattering of the ashes thing is way cool. I would still want a tombstone though, but someplace cool. Cemeteries are nice, but it's a little scary how many dead bodies are below you, and they are very necessarily public places. I want a little tombstone at the top of a mountain or something. It would be nice for it to be somewhere accessible though, so maybe at the lip of a valley. Another problem with having a tombstone above your corpse is that it's hard not to go and imagine what their body must look like at that very moment, whereas if you're cremated you can only be remembered as you were. On top of that, ground space is bound to get harder and harder to come by as time passes. I dunno if the Church has any policy on Cremation, I know we have standard procedures for funerals, but i've never heard anyone say cremation was frowned upon, I can't imagine why it would be, the end result is the same, time is the only differential (and the amount of poison the dirt around your body will soak up). One thing i don't like is the thought of Cremation itself. Because that is almost necessarily unceremonious, which is a shame really, given how ceremonious it can be. My imagination is them tossing your possibly naked corpse into a furnace. I'll have to scope out some cremators sometime in my life. Someplace with a pyre.

Wow, this post has drifted towards the macabre, but now you know, just incase there's a freak vespa accident while i'm in portugal.

So, that's the news from Biloxi Bay, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.



*I obviously meant to say decompose, but i think decombone is a hilarious word that conveys what's happening quite well