Nancy's Musings

Last night my roommate (an English professor) and I had a fascinating conversation, spurred by our Book of Mormon reading (Alma 11:3, I think), about the currently formulated possibilities for police reform. My mental library of dystopian fiction asserted itself, and I realized that most of these stories focus on the moment when some system no longer serves the people, and must be destroyed or deconstructed. Mostly, they get destroyed because the change necessary must be radical in order to avoid falling back on the same ills as the system had rested upon. Deconstruction tends to be rhetorical, and doesn't always filter down to practical application from the social critics and academics who disrupt language. As a fiction writer, I enjoy worldcrafting. I like thinking of different patterns, structures, and systems and how they might function broadly and specifically. I described a few alternative police systems to my roommate. They were radically different and sought to undo binary...

I am writing today to identify the cause of death of my most recent demi-relationship. I feel like I should acknowledge several things before I get started: 1. Specific members of police forces have gotten away with murdering black people. 2. Systemic racism continues, and most white people are more or less clueless about how to help. 3. There are protests and riots in all 50 states and in several countries outside the US. 4. Coronavirus is still a thing, although my town is in denial pretty heavily. 5. It's rude to talk about somebody else online. Despite all of these things (and because of, in the case of #4), I am going to PM this thing. My life right now is full of a disturbing level of change and worry, and I have been struggling to process emotions. Yes, I could just write it and not publish it. But I also need someone to listen to me. I hope that if he finds out, and if this bothers him, he is able to forgive me. Friends, I really like him. I enjoyed his company, and wanted ...

A few weeks ago my brother asked for recommendations for his book club, including for short stories. I recommended a very short work by Ursula K. LeGuin called " The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas " and they went for it. Well, it's like four pages long. So on the night of his book club, my little brother texts me: "What does it mean?" His very literal-minded book club had tried on several scenarios for the allegory, but none of them fit entirely, so they'd basically given up in disgust. Naturally, I went straight for the meta. "It's about censorship in fiction," I eventually posited. I can defend that reading, too, as counter-intuitive as it is. But really, it's just not that complex. The story's power is in its non-specificity (they called it "vague" which isn't wrong). It is not the moral dilemma it ostensibly seems, but a realistic distillation of contemporary life (anyone out there seen The Good Place ?). As a moral di...

Nephi wrote, "do not spend money for that which is of no worth, nor your labor for that which cannot satisfy," but follow the Savior, and "feast upon that which perisheth not, neither can be corrupted, and let your soul delight in fatness" (2 Nephi 9:51). Of what is this abundance (called "fatness") made? What comprises it? Personal Context: After being without regular, paid work for nearly nine years, I finally have a part-time job. This feels like wealth, in some ways. But my soul is hurting today for many reasons, and I turn so often for comfort to things that I want that I should not have: not just indulgences that I can afford now, but peace at the cost of agency, equality at the cost of freedom, and loved ones who make the decisions that I would make. In prayer I leak all the anxiety and terror of the world we live in now. It fills me like the fierce air of an empty oven when I just wanted the memory of baking. And God wonders why I am asking for...

So. . . people with guns stormed the capitol building in Michigan to try and intimidate legislators into voting to end the general "not doing things" thing. I think they were wrong to carry guns, and wrong to protest, but they had to do something . People are losing jobs and food is becoming more scarce, and things are scary, and people are dying, and they're saying, "just sit at home and bake sourdough!" which begins to sound a lot like, "let them eat cake" after a few weeks, and we've been doing this for. . . more than a month? We should be able to expect our government to intervene, to have plans in place, to be organized and encouraging. But we can't because we have very little say over where our tax money actually goes. If we don't have government, whom can we depend on? Well, there's Cthulhu. So I've been listening to lots of stories of H.P. Lovecraft and laughing and thinking and being repulsed for reasons he a...

I'm beginning to think that gaslighting is a thing that I sometimes do to myself. Lately, things like chickens and dishes and teaching and friendships and family have overwhelmed me. And everytime the current pulls me under again, I choke and flail and overexpress on Facebook. There are too many worries, and I am drowning. My father gives wonderful blessings. They are often inspired, and several times he has given me the same advice that I know is from my Heavenly Father. The advice and the power that he gives me is to discern between what is my job and what is not my job, and to concern myself only with those things that are mine to worry about. This type of discernment is not easy, and it is not simple. On one side of the scale, we risk avoiding responsibility for our weaknesses and bad decisions, and on the other side of the scale we risk a much-inflated sense of self which leads to the self-gaslighting that I am just beginning to understand in myself. It's a kind of s...

Reading this morning in Alma 22, I meditated for a few minutes on the word "worship" in verse 7. It felt weird. It sounded obsequious. It sounded like fawning and groveling, neither of which seemed like the proper way to address a Heavenly Father. We still use the word "worship" and I'm not sure I know what we really mean by that. The Oxford English Dictionary gives some insight into what it might have meant to Joseph Smith as he translated. As a transitive verb, its most common definition is "To honor or revere as a supernatural being or power, or as a holy thing; to regard or approach with religious veneration." The quotation closest to Joseph Smith's time was 1847: "Men have worshipped some fantastic being for living alone in a wilderness" (Arthur Helps, Friends in Council ). "Honor and revere" and "regard [. . .] with religious veneration" both still sound like fawning and groveling, respectively. Even though ...