speeding up the ticker of a walking time bomb

Many wonderful books.

The Good, the Bad, and the Furry, breaking from the "every dog is special" tradition of breed guides, calls pit bulls a "no-good, half-breed cousin" to the American Staffordshire Terrier, which it notes enjoys playing with bowling balls.

Everything Giant Sudoku was the best puzzles/dollar value in the BYU bookstore. 'Brozy and I have come to quite enjoy them after seeing them in the in-flight magazine on the way to Arizona. Try your hand on Web Sudoku.

Grant got me Godel's masterpiece, surely the most depressing piece of all time, for Christmas. I expect suicide after reading this book is the leading cause of death among logicians. Also for Christmas, three Lewis works (Great Divorce from Smurfer, other two from k_t). Thanks, all of you. Started Great Divorce last night.

Picked up Savior and the Serpent, which is aggressively thought-provoking. I'll probably devote half an entry to this when I finish it. One point, though: it makes me desperately long for the day when we routinely read hypernovels. Flipping ten pages to read a footnote is not worth any nostalgic tactile or olfactory experience. Nostalgia's a disease anyway.

Am grateful that strawberry lemonade, barbecue chicken pizza, and barbecue sauce hamburgers seem to be in fashion at restaurants. Oh, also, you should try Sonic's chicken toaster sandwich. Really fantastic. And Muenster cheese, which editor "rocking" girl, the second-best hostess ever, gave me.

Have finally moved past the blasphemy in Track 6 of Eve 6's eponymous album. (Man, I really was a little Pharisee.) There's a Face is amazing; it's the kind of melody that sounds familiar the first time you hear it. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I promised to find that song in the pre-existence.

Totally excited that 'Brozy and I aren't the only Board-inspired couple anymore. Perhaps not even the awesomest. Hurrah, hurrah.

Went home teaching Sunday with Sharkbite/Murple. He said my lesson was wonderful and incredible, which may have been merely relief at having a tolerable lesson from the inactive guy he expected to drag along, but I liked it, so I'm going to tell you about it.

President Monson's message this month was sort of Last-Trumpet-esquedly transition-free (my own home teachers won mad points admitting this--oh, as has Theric, among policies on hair styling, work, and diamonds) (I WILL DIE OF TYPING LINKS), so I overviewed his bullet points and then primarily focused on the introduction.

Our bishop's second counselor gave our elder's quorum lesson the other week, focusing on his experiences as a parent and what they've suggested to him about our Heavenly Father. He tries to read stories to his young daughters every night, but one week, they'd been so rebellious he hadn't had time for several days. He stressed to the older that she needed to hurry, but she continued to dawdle, and when he told her that she'd run out of time, she burst into tears, pleading, "I just want you to read me a story." (Have I mentioned that I suspect storytelling will be the focal reason to keep humans around in the face of mechanical superiority? (That kind of killed the mood. Sorry.)) He realized that he, too, wanted nothing more than to read her a story, but it was more important to teach her how to get a story than to mercifully give her one, so he just put her to bed, heart-broken. This, he asserted, is our echo of God's tears: He weeps because our actions compel Him to either wrong us in the short term or wrong us in the long term.

As another illustration, the second counselor continued, when he was younger, he'd been irritated that Laman and Lemuel had come to the Americas; had they just stayed home, Nephi's children would not have lived in such pitiable misery, continually beseiged by their cousins. He's since realized, though, that had they done so, the Nephites would have remained ever wicked after their first fall into pride; while Alma disagreed, often it seems that nothing but military conquest shook them to humility.

In my lesson, I postulated that opening the windows of heaven is not some millionth-customer promotion, but rather God's default course of action, that He does not immediately bless us with all He has only because it's more important to teach us how to earn and keep it. In the picture accompanying the message, a family constructing their house, I saw a type not merely of our own efforts as families to strengthen our homes, but of our course as individuals, as toddling, utility-belt-clad toddlers laboring not for the sake of the work but for the sake of the lesson.

It's a thoroughly kitschy worldview, one I doubted myself immediately after giving it--there's very little blue, little law and justice, and a surfeit of yellow comfort and red effectiveness in this God's offerings. I'm always a little uncomfortable allying myself with the "Everyone will get what he really wants in the end" theological school. Upon further reflection, though, I wonder whether it's not tenable; is not charity the greatest of the virtues? Could not purest benevolence be that great and godly qualification by which he commands and every element obeys, the principle which, were it compromised, God would cease to be God? I firmly believe that "opposition in all things" means not that we must have a bunch of trashy experiences in order to appreciate the pleasant ones, but that we must inhabit a universe with evil and sorrow in order to find satisfaction, for as in Smurfer's thoughts on the fairness of hurting others (paragraph beginning "Anyway, it was interesting"), the great blessing of agency is that we can choose to build or tear down; if indeed God read us a story whether we got ready for bed or no, we would find no fulfillment in a dreary Eden. Perhaps justice and consequence really are in place just to bring joy.

It's kind of funny how I have to approach so many concepts backward. A conversation with myself the other day, for example:
You know, you should start balancing your checkbook.
Blech, that's no fun at all.
Well, you have to check for mistakes; you caught one on an IHOP receipt once.
A bank computer, friend, is a far cry from an IHOP register.
Of course, but someone could find your credit card number and make fake purchases online.
Such a person would probably be wanting, and I would wish only that his purchases might give him a leg up.
Unlikely; credit card fraud is white-collar crime, and you should never encourage someone to sin by removing risk.
Fine, I'll check my statements.

Likewise, I've recently pursuaded myself that guilt is reasonable, though I've truthfully only pushed it up a meta-level to where the question of free will is less obtrusive, by noting that we are not, as I had before supposed, either misinformed blue beings or wicked by nature orange beings, but unsteady creatures ever vacillating between the two, and we are most culpable when while blue, we fail to prepare for the coming orangeness by building fences to slow the beast down until we regain control.

By the way, Smurfer, from Great Divorce: "I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in 'the High Countries.' In that sense it will be true for those who have completed the journey (and for no others) to say that good is everything and Heaven everywhere. But we, at the end of the road must not try to anticipate that retrospective vision. If we do, we are likely to embrace the false and disastrous converse and fancy that everything is good and everywhere is Heaven." Your hesitance was sensible.