Teenager Driving

So on Saturday, while Michelle was off to a scout meeting, Liam took me for a drive.

Things to point out:

1. I’m a lousy passenger. Even with experienced drivers.
2. I did not die, nor even freak out.

He does have his learner’s permit; he got it last Wednesday after completing drivers ed. Now he has to do 50 or 60 hours of supervised driving before he can get his license. Saturday, we did a half hour.

This is a crazy summer to be handing him the wheel. We’ve had a number of high-profile accidents lately, all involving teenagers and fatalities. I’m hoping Liam doesn’t even come close to adding to these stories. I know one does not equal the other and that just because other teens are having accidents it doesn’t mean Liam will. Nevertheless, I’m hoping nothing happens.

There are a few notable differences. Liam is 17. The other drivers in question are a year or two younger. Liam is also NOT driving with other teenagers in the car, with the exception of his siblings and only when a parent is present. And he won’t be taking a vehicle to school regularly.

Liam drove us from downtown to home, going up Sunnyside most of the way. This was his first time driving an SUV, so he wasn’t really used to that. He need to do more head checking when he changes lanes, that too I know.

Then Sunday he drove Michelle and company up to Treasure Mountain, adding about an hour and a half to his experience. He had to surrender the wheel at the Wyoming state line, as he’s not allowed to drive outside the state. Michelle says he did well then too. Hopefully, this continues.

We need to talk to our insurance company, of course. Don’t even want to know what’s going to happen there.

Politics . . .

Politics on social media, summed up

“They go low, we go high.”

[Political shots fired.]

[Most everyone immediately goes lower.]

[Most everyone decries the lack of patriotism/lack of "wokefulness” of those who didn’t duck or ducked into the wrong foxhole/bunker.]

[Those who went low peek out of their foxhole/bunker.]

“They go low, we go high.”

[Political shots fired.]

[Repeat.]

Mecentricity

It’s important, first of all, to remember that everything that happens in the world around you targets only one person: You.

If you don’t remember this, you’re not going to function well in this world where umbrage is preferred over understanding.

And it’s important, second of all, to shout into the empty room that is social media rather than to talk with the real flesh-and-blood entities circulating the air around you – but after all, they’re less important since, as you remember, everything that happens in the world around you targets you and you alone. Never mind that in talking with them you might find that it’s the Copernican model of the solar system that works, not the one you’ve got in mind.

Also, don’t forget a good hashtag or two as you vent your frustrations in a passive-aggressive fashion.

Yes, the irony of me posting this on an ill-read blog and then linking to it via my Facebook account does not escape me, But remember – I’m reacting to a world in which affronts to me and my personality and my beliefs are targeted solely at me, so it’s my right to lash out into the darkness in a way that helps me vent my righteous anger without, you know, actually thinking about my actions or talking before I post or tweet and maybe – just maybe, mind you – growing in understanding and then watching my anger and victimhood uselessly evaporate in the face of the evidence that the thing that offended me was not targeted at me.

But where’s the fun in that?

Because in understanding, sometimes you have to face some ugly truths:

1. The world does not revolve around you
2. The beliefs you hold might indeed be wrong, wholly or in part
3. Your actions are often deserving of consequences, no matter how unrighteous your accusers may be
4. You don’t always know others’ motivations
5. If you think you know others’ motivations, it’s more likely than not you’re only interpreting their motivations through the lens of everything in the world focusing on you, meaning the chances of your misinterpreting their motivations are high.

And if you think this doesn't apply to you  -- or that if someone appears to be selfish it is because they still think what they believe is correct, then you've missed the point. You're still centered on you.

Don’t assume this is a philosophical argument against absolutes. Because there are times when, indeed, you are individually targeted and where the empty room of social media is the last venue open to you and the hashtag your last hope of bringing attention to your case. Or indeed your religion, your ethnic group, even your age category can be summarily attacked, leaving you to feel icky.

Then again, there are times to talk to those around you. Particularly when the situation is ambiguous and those you can talk to are your colleagues.

But sometimes – just sometimes, mind you – the situation is as I’ve said. You are not the primary target.

I fall victim to this kind of thinking all the time. I’m me-centric. But they say the way to a cure is to first recognize you have a problem.

"Why'd You Leave the Trail?"

I’d never hiked Big Elk Creek before, but despite the weight on my back and the mud on parts of the trail, I was enjoying myself.

I’m not in the best of shape, but I’m willing. I take up the rear, making sure any Scouts we’re hiking with don’t get left behind. Ahead of me is Sam, a Scout who’d never backpacked before in his life. He had a good pack, but the hike was long, mostly uphill, and he was getting a little tired. In front of him is Paul, my assistant Scoutmaster. He’s hiked this trail before. We’re in good hands.

To the left is the creek, bubbling over the rocks and through the tiny meadows at the bottom of the valley. To the right, mountains, some covered thickly with pine and aspen, others with tumbles of rock. There are mountains beyond the creek too, and as we hike the mountains get steeper, taller, and closer together. And we have a well-worn trail to follow. And Paul is leading us. No worries.

We cross yet another rock fall, stumbling here and there over a shifting slab. We walk across more rocks. And even more rocks. But we’re talking one to the other, marveling at the scenery.

That’s funny. The creek is smaller. And a bit further to the left than before. And – wait a minute – we’re climbing the side of the mountain, now scrambling over the rocks, and the creek is retreating further to our left.

“I think we lost the trail,” Paul says as we three sit on convenient boulders. “We shouldn’t be this high. We should be right next to the creek. But that’s okay. We’ll just work our way down.”

Just work our way down.

Over more rocks, now here and there punctuated with fallen trees, stripped of their needles but their bare branches still poking up like fence posts. We have to go through them, lest we turn around and lose distance, further falling behind our companions who stayed on the trail and are further ahead of us now. We wrestle our shoulders through the trees and over the branches, our backpacks get caught. We’re thirsty. Sam is out of water, so I share a bit of mine. And no matter how far we walk, we can’t seem to get down the mountain. We can still see the creek – we can even see the trail, brown amidst the meadow grasses, near the stream’s banks. But fight as we might, we can’t lose much of the altitude we’ve gained.

Gradually, inch by inch, log by log, rock by rock, we fight our way down to the trail. Our feet finally plod in the brown dust where we see our companions’ footprints. We walk through a glad,e take a turn and we see them, tents set up, a fire going. A few of them are climbing rocks. Others are splashing in the creek.

“What took you so long?” Benson, a scout, asks.

“We got a little lost,” I said.

“There’s only one trail,” he said. “How’d you get lost?”

“We kinda found a new trail,” Paul said.

“You should have stuck with the real trail,” he said.

Yes, we should have. But we were so distracted by the scenery and our conversation, we didn’t notice we’d left the trail until the landscape became a lot more difficult to traverse.

On the way home, we followed the trail. Paul, Sam and I stuck together again. This time we didn’t stray. “How’d we miss this?” Paul asked. Because it was clear our wanderings up the rock fall and the mountainside added at least an hour to our journey, as the hike from our campsite to the big rock fall where we recognized we’d lost the trail wasn’t all that long.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“We weren’t paying attention, that’s clear,” Paul added, laughing. “Or at least I wasn’t. And you two just followed me.”

Ah, the lesson.

You knew there’d be a lesson.

God and life present us with two great influences: Our companions, and our free agency. Used well, whether in tandem or opposition, those two great influences will determine how difficult our journey through life will be.

Paul is a good companion. Experienced with the backcountry, with first aid, even with backcountry rescue. But I let my trust in him override my agency. Because, when we started climbing the rocks, I saw to my left, just lower down the slope, where the trail again emerged from the rocks. I could have used my agency to call out, “Paul, the trail’s down here!” and though he was further ahead, he would have descended, got back on the trail, and we would have joined our companions for a leisurely evening. Instead, I ignored my own senses and followed that companion up the difficult path, taking the trusting but hapless Sam with me.

Had I listened to myself, had I believed what I saw with my own eyes, a simple correction would have had us back on course. But I waited until that course correction was much more difficult and time consuming.

I surrendered my agency and three of us paid the price.

Were there times, I wonder, when one of the sons of Mosiah saw the correct path, but instead of calling to his companions to set them on the right way just went along with his friends, up that difficult road that led to an angel descending from heaven and sending Alma the Younger into a stupor in which he was wracked with torment. “Nevertheless, after wading through much tribulation” he says in Mosiah Chapter 27, verse 28, “repenting high unto death, the Lord in mercy hath seen fit to snatch me out of an everlasting burning, and I am born of God.”

“My soul hath been redeemed from the gall of bitterness and bonds of iniquity,” he continues in verse 29. “I was in the darkest abyss; but now I behold the marvelous light of God. My soul was racked with eternal torment; but I am snatched, and my soul is pained no more.”

What pain Mosiah’s sons and Alma the Younger – sons of the king, son of the prophet – could have avoided had one of them, somewhere early in their journey, noticed they were off the path if even only a little bit, and said, “Gentlemen, the path we want is over there.”

A quick correction based on what I could see with my own eyes would have prevented a lot of weariness as we backpacked Big Elk Creek. I chose, however, to surrender my agency – and three of us suffered the consequences. May we all choose our companions wisely, and love them enough to offer correction, is my prayer, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

Reading the Old Testament

As a family, we just finished reading the Old Testament. And I’ve got to confess, reading the OT really reminded me of good ol’ Frank Costanza.

It wasn’t all like that. And most of the grievances aired therein are probably justified. But as I enjoy the privilege of turning to other scripture for comfort as well as chastisement, the constant barrage of grievances wore a bit thin.

Reading the Old Testament has strengthened my testimony of scripture, particularly of the Book of Mormon, where we get a slightly different shade of chastisement, much more often mixed with compassion and mercy. An institute teacher long ago said he believed the theme of the Book of Mormon was God showing us his “tender mercies,” and for what it’s worth, I think he’s right.

I’m proud of our familial accomplishment for spiritual as well as secular reasons. Spiritually, as Christians, I think it’s important that we have our children read the scriptures. Not reading them, well, it sounds a bit funny. We had some great conversations, particularly about the chastisement, the anger, and often the violence shown in the Old Testament. We tried to navigate and separate the spiritual from the secular.

On the secular side, I’m proud our kids read the book, particularly as we read it aloud. I hear many other children their same age read the scriptures aloud – or anything aloud for that matter – and they struggle a lot more with the archaic language than our kids do. We still may not agree on how to pronounce “Nebuchadnezzar,” but we can at least approach the name with gusto, having read it aloud so many times.

Also, I got to show this video to my kids when we discussed Moses and the Ten Commandments. What could be better than that?

We’ve often speculated that one of the “missing” commandments was “Thou Shalt Invent Paper Really Quickly So This Does Not Happen Again.”

We have now read, as a family, all four of the standard works of our church. That’s a good feeling.

Farewell, Mr. Sallis

“Mind how you go, Gladys. Best of luck from all us pigeons.”

-- Norman Clegg, bidding farewell to the pigeon he released after the funeral of Compo Simmonite

 

Peter Sallis may be Norman Clegg. He may be Wallace of the Wrong Trousers.

 

But to me, Peter Sallis will always be a connection to my father.

 

I have to admit it was Compo Dad likes most, with his scruffy clothes and insatiable admiration for Nora Batty, aside from her wrinkled stockings.

 

But as Dad sat and watched and laughed at Compo’s shenanigans during his weekly viewing of Last of the Summer Wine on PBS, it was often Cleggy I noticed.

Now Clegg, like Dad, is gone.

 

Clegg, the quiet, often mousy man, caught in the middle of Compo and Foggy – Last of the Summer Wine will always be Clegg, Compo, and Foggy – is the man I noticed most. He so wanted life to be quiet, to be left to him to putter away his remaining years. He never had much fun in life, or so it seems – he claimed his light of passion went out when he was all of twenty-three). He’s much like me, I think (except my light’s still going, fortunately enough). Happy to go along with Compo and Foggy, but certainly happy when the adventure was over and he could have a pint or a cuppa.

 

He knew he was a pigeon, and quietly relished it.

 

Yes, he was part of a trio that never really grew up. But he was more often than not the adult in the room, even if he was impish.

 

Kinda like Dad. Dad never really grew up. Even in his later years, he wanted goats in the back yard. He loved driving his 1948 Ford truck, or his 1985 Nissan ZX, or the ’47 Willys Jeep we had – in which I learned to drive, even if Dad was the one shifting the gears.

 

Dad was the kind of quiet guy who quietly knew everyone.

 

I hear a lot of Dad in Norman Clegg:

 

Vicar: How’re you keeping?
Clegg: Me bowel’s playing up a bit. God moves in mysterious ways.

 

Clegg: It used to be a tradition here if you were hungry you could knock on any door and without a moment’s hesitation they’d slam it, straight in your face.

Compo: Well, that’s that got to do with owt?

Clegg: Huh, just shows they had character. Now we’re into an age of compassion. The world’s full of folk hating folk for hating folk.

 

Pearl: How long have you been interested in balloons?

Clegg: Oh, it’s just a passing fancy.

Pearl: Well, I hope it passes a bit quicker than some of Howard’s.

Clegg: Basically, it’s just to keep me occupied until my skateboard comes.

Only One Meme

So this happened today:

So I have to ask myself (instead of “This is not my beautiful stapler, this is not my beautiful chair!” what, exactly, is a meme, and how is a meme different than “just images with text.”

I went a-searching.

Which led me first to Richard Dawkins. I know. Eerie.

Per Wikipedia: a meme is “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture,” quoting Dawkins. Wikipedia adds “A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.”

More on memes here. Pretty much the same thing, though this site helpfully provides a lot of examples, and a more straightforward definition: the concept of memes “is either really deep, or really, really obvious,” with most of them sporting an element of humor.

(I, being an uncool person, have no idea if the sites I’m getting the information from are accepted by the meme purists.)

The Urban Dictionary emphasized the viral quality of an image, a “virus of the mind especially contagious to children and the impressionable.” That makes me wonder how impressionable ThePsychoipath is. This definition may help explain why the jet fuel image is a meme while the others aren’t, until you hear arguments that the other images on this particular list are also viral – within their respective cultures. Does a meme have to cross cultures or leave its culture to become a meme? The world may never know.

Question: Does this commercial come packed with memes? We’ve got the Yes Man – a meme from a different medium – a Peter Lorre imitation, and probably other memeified items I don’t even recognized because they’re just that far outside my cultural knowledge.

Since I’m not inside the head of “ThePsychopath” I cannot directly discern the origins of his/her pedantry, but I’m going to make an assumption that said pedantry stems from the “cultural ideas” and the “within a culture” portions of the meme definitions.

In other words, since the jet fuel “meme” carries cultural weight to those in the culture of 9/11 skepticism/denialism or research, this unit is the only one that qualifies as a meme in ThePsychopath’s” assessment of the other images on the list.

However, if I were to put on my English Major Hat, arguments can be made in favor of all of the other images – whether they be true memes or just images with text – being memes in their own right.

No. 2, for example, carries cultural ideas within the culture of Furries, right?

And I’ve certainly seen enough re-use of medieval art with modern captions to let me assume there’s a culture out there fascinated with looking at this art with modern eyes.

And tell me, ThePsychopath, that nos. 8 and 13 don’t scream of cultural ideas blossoming within the culture of Star Wars fans . . . even slightly creepy ones. (I don’t know enough about the faces the suns are pulling in No. 17 to address whether this image appeals to the Star Wars culture, another culture, or represents some kind of crossover – but certainly it, too, bears cultural ideas within that given culture, whatever it is.)

So I think the question here – what is a meme, and what counts as one – will have to be at best left open, at worst left open to interpretation. If you know ThePsychopath, however, have him/her drop me a line. I’d love to discuss this further.