I’m terrible at meditation. If we were in some kind of Buddhist junior high school, I’d always get picked last for those competitive meditating teams. Jana suspects that I suffer from some kind of attention deficit disorder, but I’ve made my peace with that–add my name to the long line of troubled geniuses […]

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I had my last meeting with my professor yesterday and handed in a stack of papers that were due. As a result, I’m completely manic today–I’m a total chatterbox, machine-gunning poor Jana with my opinions on all sort of things. I’ll subject you to a few of them here:
My first act as a […]

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I am a hacker failure. I tried to crack Jana’s blog so that I could put a birthday message that all her friends, family and fans could comment on, but instead I got Blogger.com to fire an email message to her saying that they were resetting her password. So I’ve lost the element […]

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Yesterday I was released as one of instructors for my men’s group (called the Elders’ Quorum, despite its twenty to thirty something demographic). Despite the mental gymnastics I sometimes had to pull to adhere to the lesson plan and still conform to my own personal values (the missionary lessons were the hardest, since my […]

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Sometimes I think (and hope) that President Dubya is a gift to the Democrats. The disappointment that the Dems have felt towards the Bush Administration has burst the levee and is spilling over into the GOP. But there’s one problem. Public opinion is against the Republicans (and incumbent Democrats, for that […]

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I’m deeply immersed in my U. S. religious history readings, and I find myself continually amazed at how relevant to the here and now all this old stuff is. For example, The Democratization of American Christianity recounts the religious revolution of the early to mid- 1800s revivals, when uneducated, rural preachers rebelled against the […]

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Today I attended a lecture by Stanley Fish and ended up eavesdropping on a conversation between my former advisor (a wonderful human being and the chair of the brand new Religious Studies program at UCI), Mark C. Taylor, and Jack Miles. What was the topic? Mormons! Specifically, Joseph Smith and the Mark […]

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Next week is finals! This semester is like eating a home-cooked meal in Italy–the courses are scrumptious but they keep on coming and you have no choice but to force it all down. It’s sweet agony, and dull relief is but a week away.

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Jana’s sitting in one of the wingback chairs watching Hotel Rwanda on her laptop. Occasionally I hear her gasp, and I look up to see her grimace in the glow of the laptop screen.
I just finished reading a textbook for one of my classes, so I try to wind down by reading webcomics and […]

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I get a late night craving and break my fast-food fast. My eye is single to the glory of the deep-fried chicken strip.
I hand my cash to a petite Latina woman. She is very, very pregnant.
“Is it hard to be standing all day?” I ask. She struggles to understand me and says, […]

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