Nancy's Musings

I love listening. I love sitting still and letting other people say what they're thinking. I don't always believe what people tell me, because I'm cynical, but I think people are beautiful on the inside, and the things that they tell me are often just another way of being beautiful, even if I think they're wrong or lying or even both. I also like talking. I can talk a lot - for hours, and never touch on a subject twice. As a matter of fact, people who can (and do) pull a conversation back to where it began often annoy me, because it's like insisting that an oak tree should bend into a trellis. I feel like conversation is a thing that's meant to reach upwards, not twist into circles. Lately, things have been odd for me. I moved to a different state, and I've been making some new friends, and reconnecting with old friends. I'm further away from my family. Things are different. I listen a lot. I feel useful, which is something that I've craved for ...

Arguments against pornography are many and varied, but recovering addicts will admit that it changes the way we see people, and it skews our ideas of the role of intimacy in a relationship. With a simple google search, you can find scholarly articles that analyze the social and neurological effects. For a few years - I'm not sure if it's still the habit - we used "porn" to describe anything that offered a visual reward of some kind, from " food porn " to "destruction porn" (don't google that one. It'll take you straight to pornhub, which is disturbing on several levels) and even further to images that satisfy a need for visual order. They all give us a kind of satisfaction when we look at them. I have a particular satisfaction when I read stories or see movies about people who seem to be incapable of making human mistakes. It's called "competence porn" among my friends, and it's very, very satisfying, whether the char...

Because I have been more or less homeschooling my niece this month, I asked her to write a letter to her mum about a trip we took to the local art museum , and then to repurpose it into a blog post. I threatened to publish it. So this is her repurposed essay on the art museum. I offered feedback, but have not made any corrections or changes.               On Monday, May 22, my aunt Nancy, my Grandma, and I took a trip to the St. George Art Museum. The museum was exhibiting many different types of art work. Those that we looked at were water colors, photography, textiles, and paintings. There was even a piece done in stained glass. I thoroughly enjoyed examining the beautiful work shown there, and hearing Nancy’s loud opinions on all the artwork. I had a few exceptional favorites, although you could tell everything displayed was created with an amazing amount of skill and dedication. Every piece had an astounding amount of detail. Many of t...

I'm fascinated by the word "divisive" and this post will be about working through some of what I think it means. If you believe in meaning. I'm house-sitting for a professor today who when I was an undergraduate, taught me some critical theory which was really, you know, critical. *giggles at own pun* This is going to be seriously reductive, but unless you go online and watch a Harvard professor explain it in detail for several hours (still not doing it justice), there's no way to not be reductive about critical theory. I am at heart a structuralist. I like to look at frames and systems in the abstract and compare them to other frames and systems. I see the shape of things underneath. But at some point, the structuralist project became reduced to a series of binary distinctions, like 1:1 antonyms, which then became food for deconstruction. Derrida in an interview explained that anytime you put words to a distinction between concepts it is in the nature...

I love Winter. It's my favorite season. But I am just having the hardest time coming up with reasons to look forward to next year. So since I'm a masochist, this is the "reasons 2017 might not suck as hard as I think it's going to" list. I'm determined not to stop listing until I have at least twelve. 1) If I stay on schedule, I could actually receive my PhD this year. I know I've said this before, that's why this list includes the word "might" in the title. 2) Plants grow in the Spring, so I can start my seedlings next month or so. 3) I get to celebrate everybody's birthday ALL OVER AGAIN!!! Thank-you, Facebook. 4) I could finally move to Idaho. I'm just waiting for the word. I have all my winter clothes packed. Under my skin, really. This *gestures to abundant self* never gets cold. 5) This could be the year I meet a kind, intelligent, confident, single, and open-minded man who wants to spend time with me. Any time at all....

Today, right before the Christmas Program, the Bishop's counselor announced the death of a member of the stake. He said it with a little bit of irony: my ward is being transferred to another stake at the beginning of next year. Most of the members of my ward don't live in these boundaries, and I'm sure most people shrugged off the announcement, but I'm afraid I was too surprised to look at anyone. I'm a local girl. I grew up in this house. I've been a member of this stake since the mid 1980s. The name was familiar to me - not because it matched a face. I have no idea what he looked like. I only met him once. But his signature is as familiar to me as my own. He was the stake Patriarch who gave me my Patriarchal Blessing. I'm not particularly sentimental. I was as surprised to find myself crying through three hours of church as anyone else would have been, if they'd noticed. But words mean a lot to me, and those words are alive. St. George is thickly do...

What changed overnight was how I think about people. And that change was not subtle. Maybe I sin in my new cynicism and mistrust: I certainly mourn. But I feel what I feel, and I'm not going to pretend. Perhaps my sin was relying on the arm of flesh, as the scripture probably goes. Or maybe I did not sin at all, and this is one of the consequences of earth life. In this absurd proportion of grief and drama precipitated by a long series of horrifyingly bad collective decisions, I am grasping for an eternal perspective: truths that will give me some firm ground to stand on, and maybe even allow me to move forward. The Book of Mormon is the singularly most depressing book I have ever read - and I've read several slogs by Thomas Hardy. Book of Mormon prophets Mormon and Moroni witnessed the destruction of their people. Older records describe armies literally killing each-other down to the last man until whole nations were corpses and the water was blood. There is no easy co...