Nancy's Musings

I had a challenging conversation last night with a friend who is a non-practicing Jehovah's Witness. Although she is non-practicing, she is very firmly set in her beliefs, at least on the subject we touched on last night. This rigidity of thought reminded me of a blog post by Michael Austin at By Common Consent . He discusses the need in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to be able to admit that we are wrong. But I came around to this article in a kind of backwards way. A long, long time ago when I was serving my mission in Germany I remember encountering people who were simply not interested in exploring new ideas because their religions offered them everything they wanted, culturally and philosophically. I remember vividly how strange it felt to talk to someone who expressed interest in listening to what we had to say. I didn't trust it. What kind of people could simply abandon what they'd learned all their lives? But I was there to teach and be a cond...

Ecclesiastes is my favorite Old Testament book. I love that it's a puzzle. It gives the shapes of certain things, and leaves you to understand what has been omitted. And in the omissions I can see amazing things. I do not believe everyone sees the same things. But I saw something the other day that you might find interesting. Ecclesiastes is strange sort of text with a fairly comprehensive indictment of mortality. If mortality is everything, then everything is nothing. A fascinating philosophical premise! I quote from the KJV: "What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?" (1:3). "Under the sun" is, according to a footnote, a phrase that comprehends mortality and nothing more. I pondered this question yesterday. Why do we work? "All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing [Netflix, anyone?], nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and ...

I am a structuralist at heart. In oversimplified terms, that means I enjoy finding identical patterns in disparate places. For a long time, I've complained that books and other media published for religious audiences are applauded because of all the things they do not contain. You've heard it, I'm sure. "There's hardly any swearing! There's no sex. There's no violence. There's no homosexuality (problematic in itself). There's no. . ." etc. There's also usually very little plot, conflict, diversity, or meat. Literarily, it's sugar-free cotton candy. Sure, it doesn't have the stuff in it that culturally somebody (probably somebody else. These are decisions that most people outsource) decided is a problem, but it also doesn't contain any sustaining nutrients. When I studied abroad during my Master's program, my tutor carefully explained some differences in grading systems between this country and his. Whereas we here in the U...

My rejection from teaching at BYU-Idaho is a big deal to me, but mostly as another nail in the coffin of my academic career. Emotionally, I fight a lot of "nobody wants me" feelings, and the constant employment rejection is a concrete manifestation of that conviction. But as I wrote in my last post, I'm not here on earth solely for or at other people's pleasure. I have a lot of student loans. My debt increases about $1,000 every two months since I achieved my PhD. I need and want to make money, but normal revenue streams are not available to me. I make what money I can at freelancing, babysitting, and odd jobs, but the time-to-income ratio is insufficient for long-term purposes. I have known for a long time that I should write novels for my mental health, so I'm going to put more effort into trying to sell them. Last year I polished a short thriller titled This Prison . I contacted a few agents about it, even, and collected some rejection. I'm more hesitan...

Trigger warning: if this is gonna make you sad, you might look at pictures of kittens instead. I am not a mental health professional. I'm just me, and my experiences are individual, and not intended to be generalized. If this doesn't help you, throw it away and find something that does. A few months ago, my congregation heard a really amazing presentation/lecture on suicide in our community. Since I have been suicidal (mildly, and not recently, thank God), I prepared myself to listen by writing down some notes and memories. I thought maybe somebody might find them useful. I identified three justifications that my sad/scared brain found to push me toward self-harm and suicide, and I also identified the tools and truths that my strong brain found to help me keep going until I could see light again. Reason 1 (a lie) : I am a burden on others, and a net loss in life. Even knowing that it's a lie, my brain actually still believes this. For those of us with certai...

This poem by William Wordsworth (Romantic poet, friend of Shelley and Coleridge, brother of Dorothy Wordsworth) has been stuck in my head for several months now. Beginning with the bodily metaphors that describe energy expended in unfruitful pursuits, we can hear the frustration of a poet who cannot find any harmony between the wild, dangerous, and stormy passions of nature (imagine the intimacy between sea and wind!) and the sordid onanism of capitalistic production and acquisition. In other words, Wordsworth is complaining that we waste energy in "Getting and spending" (ln 2) and are too preoccupied with such dull things to experience  Nature (a loaded term for Wordsworth, but I'm not going to bother to unpack it here). And then he writes, "I'd rather be / a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;" (lns 9-10). Wordsworth is looking to ancient religions jealously and resenting Christianity for inoculating him against the sublime - the terror and wonder in th...

I genuinely like myself - my body, my brain, my personality, my opinions, my interests and skills. But I have been around me for a long, long time, and I don't really have many secrets left for myself to discover. I have lost my novelty. I'm comfortable. I easily change sizes to fit myself. Tonight I cooked dinner for someone who didn't come home. She left me for Marvel. I watched a horror movie by myself. I did not the slightest stitch of housework (although I'm going to, because clutter is starting to bother me), and I didn't feel the slightest bit judged. I don't hate being alone. I'm not afraid of being alone, even after Mercy Black (2019). But sometimes I really want to talk, and right now that desire to talk to someone is flailing around like a fire hose, even though if I did have something specific to say, this post would be a lot more enjoyably concrete. I am not enjoyably concrete. I'm squishy, like this post. (Has sudden image of gel...