Adventures in YSA Dance Planning

Back around the turn of the millennium in the backwoods of Washington state, my teenage self was selected to some "Stake Youth Leadership Committee" or whatever it was called; ostensibly its purpose was to call one representative teen from each ward, in order to involve the Youth of Zion directly in the decision-making processes of the Stake by...doing leadership things, I guess?  Actually, I never was quite clear what our point was.

Mainly we went to meetings.  Lots and lots of meetings.  I seem to recall a group of us painfully self-conscious, sleep-deprived teenagers already anxious about school, sports, extracurriculars, summer jobs, college-admissions, and trying not to have lustful thoughts about the opposite sex (or the same-sex, whatever the case may have been), gathered around a large mahogany table at the Stake Center on a rainy Saturday afternoon with some Baby Boomers who knew our parents.

They solicited our feedback on various particulars pertinent to the youth of the Church, earnestly listened to our suggestions, seriously discussed them...then promptly dismissed off hand, as the adults in the room kindly informed us what we were going to do instead.  It didn't take me long to realize that our actual function was less to be "leaders" (as we were repeatedly--and perhaps a bit too earnestly--assured), than to serve as the glorified errand-boys (and girls) of the Stake Presidency.

Primarily this service involved unfolding chairs.  That, and reluctantly inviting surly teenagers to attend some Sunday Evening Youth Fireside they didn't want to attend, particularly the night before they were expected to get up for 6:30AM Seminary (which they also didn't want to attend).  Then later, we would have to explain, yet again, to the baffled adults why no teenagers wanted to attend their lame Firesides.  They would then earnestly solicit our feedback on ways to make the Firesides more attractive to the Youth of Zion, and the cycle would begin anew.

Yet though the position was custom-made for the sneers of moody teenagers...

...I wasn't a total cynic about it, and actually tried to effect some genuine change during my tenure on that committee.  Specifically, I lasered my sights down onto the one activity under our purview that at least some of the Youth attended voluntarily:

The Church Dances.

As with all things Church related, attendance was OK but not great.  Our Church Leaders worried: How could we convince more of our Youth that dressing up in Sunday clothes on a not-Sunday in order to "boogy" to YMCA, Will Smith, and late-90s Boy Bands was more attractive than a High School party with beer, "Rap," swear words, and making out?  We were beginning with an obvious handicap, but I believed we could do it.

First, I helpfully suggested that dropping the Sunday-dress-requirement alone would vastly increase attendance.  But judging by their reactions, you'd think I'd suggested hosting heroin-fueled orgies in the chapel or serving Diet Coke: "We will not be dropping our standards," they piously affirmed.  "Who said anything about dropping standards?" I protested, "I just said we should maybe not require Church clothes at a dance!  What on earth does clothing have to do with morality?" 

"We don't want immodest clothing in our dances," they parried.  "Since when are jeans and t-shirts immodest?" I asked, "What is so unspiritual about dancing in comfortable clothing?"  Nevertheless, they somehow had it in their mind that neck-ties and floor-skirts were all that stood between us and "spaghetti-straps" and/or leather-bondage, I guess.  (It was precisely this sort of False-Binary thinking that drove me to Post-Structuralism in the first place).

"We're not dropping our clothing standards," they made clear in no uncertain terms.  "Alright, but don't keep complaining to me when no one attends your dances," I replied.  (As you can probably guess, I only lasted a year in that calling).

Nevertheless, I could see that the non-Sunday-clothes thing was a non-starter, so I shifted my attention to at least influencing the music itself.  Once again, I ran into resistance, as the adults seemed to assume that NSYNC, Smashmouth, and utterly non-self-aware renditions of the Village People was all that stood between us and grinding to Marilyn Manson or whatever.  (If I could have at least eliminated the "Men In Black" theme-song from rotation, I might have been satisfied.)  Now, granted these were popular songs at the time, and many teenagers sincerely enjoyed dancing to them, I fully understood why the DJs played them.  

But not all teenagers enjoy listening to them; shoot, even the kids who liked NSYNC didn't like listening to them all the time.  Yet adding different songs to the playlist was like pulling teeth.  Here these adults were trying to convince more Youth of Zion to attend these dances, all while actively discouraging anyone whose music tastes were even slightly left of the dial from attending.  But though we tried to introduce, say, a little Weezer now and then, or even something danceable like The Beastie Boys, the chaperones shut us down.

Once, some friends of mine got the DJ to play the goofy "Intergalactic," of all things, and the aging chaperone straight up yelled at us to shut it off.  They asked me the next day, in all bafflement, if it had "bad lyrics" or something.  We Alta Vista'd it (it was the 90s); there weren't.  Even "Hotel California," a hit from their generation, got nixed, for being about haunted houses or played-backwards-directions-to-the-L.A.-Church-of-Satan or some such nonsense.

So I narrowed down my focus even further: Chairs.  I just wanted there to be more chairs at the dances.  The folks who did bother to attend mainly just wanted hang out with their friends anyways, and it gets tiring just standing around waiting for free chairs to open.  So I suggested that we should set out more tables and chairs, to give people a place to sit and chat, you know, actually enjoy each others' company.  "But then the kids won't dance!" came the complaint. 

This was too much.  "We don't dance anyways!" I cried out, exasperated, "The music is lame, our clothes are uncomfortable, we only go cause our parents make us, and if we enjoy ourselves it's purely by accident!  If you actually want more kids to attend your boring dances, the very least you can do is put out more chairs."  They didn't concede my point, but they also didn't try to stop me when I physically opened the supply-closet myself and set out more chairs and tables all alone.  That, sadly, was the extant of my moral victories in High School.

Over a decade later, I strolled past a chapel in Utah where I could over-hear a Stake Youth Dance inside, and was astounded to pick out, yes, Will Smith and late-90s Boy Bands.  Goodness, have Church dances really changed so little since I was young?  And the folks my age who are presumably running these wards now: are they still just as baffled as their parents were by how few Youth attend their lame events?

This even feels like an easy problem to fix--especially today in the Spotify/Pandora generation, when we could easily make a whole Mutual activity out of asking kids to come up with new playlists that one could vet before a dance even began, which could in turn excite kids enough to attend these dances in the first place to hear their favorite songs.  It's a horizontal/participatory, rather than a vertical/spectacle, approach to making dances truly communal, engaging, and rejuvenating.  Once upon a time, Brigham Young held dances in the Nauvoo Temple itself--he understood the dire need of cutting loose, getting outside of yourself, and being wild and free.  Let us learn from that example and actually enjoy ourselves on purpose for a change.

Re: "Ball-Ghazi"

So apparently the whole contrived controversy about the Patriots using slightly under-inflated footballs in their blow-out win over Indianapolis has already been termed "Ball-ghazi."

This pleases me.  For we typically apply the suffix "-gate" to reference some potentially earth-shattering scandal that threatens to bring down the highest echelons of power, as Watergate did to Nixon.  By contrast, we use "Bengazi" to reference some totally manufactured scandal and non-existent conspiracy, blown clear out of proportion and artificially kept alive solely because it implicates someone we irrationally hate.  Way to live up to the original, Ball-ghazi.

That having been said, screw the Pats, GO SEAHAWKS!!!

This Week In Racial Double-Standards: Football vs. Hockey

Hockey is a sport, I am told, wherein it is considered standard to ram your opponent into a wall, talk trash in the rink to get in your opponent's heads, and tear off your gloves and throw off your face mask and get into a fist-fight right there on the ice.  There is even always a penalty-box for just this contingency.  Some Hockey fans even joke that they only go to games for the fist-fights.

And I'm not even condemning that: it's all part of the game, the trash-talk, the fist-fights, I understand.  Everyone's racing around the rink in a mad fury, the adrenalin gets pumping, emotions run high, I get it.  It's all part of the fun, in fact, it's cool.  I salute you Hockey fans, I really do.  May your fist-fights always keep Hockey America's 4th most popular sport, edging out Soccer, Arena Football, Pro Lacrosse, and the WNBA.

I just can't help but note that, despite all this nakedly violent behavior, no one ever calls Hockey players thugs, is all.  And not coincidentally, Hockey is a predominately white sport.

I bring this up because my Seahawks just had the most miraculous comeback in football playoff history last night, and I'm still riding the buzz off that.  Yet while I was reading too many game recaps this morning, I learned that Marshawn Lynch may be fined by the NFL yet again for some celebratory touchdown crotch-grab that would've been considered tame by Michael Jackson 20 years ago--and which, compared to Ray Rice's wife-beating and Ben Roethlisberger's sexual-assault, seems downright petty.  I then made the mistake of skimming some of these comments sections, where of course I encountered the common label of "thug" lobbed against Lynch.

To which all I can say is: Really?  The man who runs a non-profit that helps disadvantaged youth in his native Oakland, and by all accounts will literally give you the shirt off his back if you compliment it, and, you know, doesn't rape or beat or murder?  This is the guy getting called "classless," a thug?  (We have some very differing definitions of what it means to be "classy".)  Guys, if you don't like the Seahawks, that's fine, I hated the Steelers after Superbowl 40, I understand--but don't pretend to some smugly-hypocritical moral superiority here.

Richard Sherman likewise gets the "thug" label a lot--that is, a 3.9 GPA honor student at Stanford who actually attended classes and successfully escaped the ghetto, is called a "thug."  He trash-talks, yes, but certainly not to Hockey levels--in fact, he usually just trash-talks back (he's never said a mean thing about Peyton Manning or Aaron Rodgers, for example), and usually apologizes afterwords--even though, like Hockey, where the adrenalin gets pumping and emotions run high, trash-talk is all part of the game.

But of course, Lynch and Sherman are black.  And so despite being far less violent or mouthy or prone to fist-fights than a white Hockey player, they are the ones getting labeled the heavily-loaded and racially-encoded term: "thugs."  This is something I can't help but notice on this MLK Day.

On the Post-Holidays Slump, Death, and Sports

In the U.S., few things are more melancholy than December 26th.  Shoot, few things are more depressing than Christmas day by noon.  The months long build-up of the Holiday season stretching clear back to October comes to a climactic crescendo Christmas morn and then...that's it.  It's over. Stick a fork in it. Sweep up the wrapping paper, play with your new toys, and see if your material possessions can distract you from the crashing come-down in the pit of your stomach.  

Yes, we still have New Years Eve to look forward to as a sort of consolation prize, the last hiccup of the holidays, but for all intents and purposes the season is over; and the sole, awkward question perpetually left over, year after year after year, is whether to take down the decorations by the 31st, or the 1st, or the 2nd, or maybe MLK Day or even Valentines Day (depending on how pathetic we're feeling).   Perhaps part of why we let the Christmas season last so long nowadays is we're aware of how abruptly it ends--and this despite the fact that this happens every single year, yet we never have a contingency plan for the post-Christmas come-down.  We steadfastly refuse to think of the end.

The irony is that it doesn't have to be that way!  In predominantly-Catholic Latin-America, for example, December 25th is not the end of Christmas but the beginning!  Remember the 12 days of Christmas?  They actually observe it down south, and the 25th is but the first day, which does not conclude till the Enunciation (or Three Kings Day) on January 6th.  New Years becomes just one extra fiesta in the midst of 12 straight days of fiestas.  By the time the 12 days are through, you are satiated, you are glutonized, such that you are actually ready for Christmas-time to be over at last!  Unlike their Anglo counterparts, Latin-Americans steadfastly refused to let Christmas get trimmed down, because they never forget about the coming end.

Remember that Mexico is the one with the Day of the Dead, wherein they openly, explicitly, embrace the fact of their eventual demise.  The worship of Santa Muerte (Saint Death) is currently a growing sect south of the border, because they are keenly aware of how they are surrounded by and subject to death at all times.  Meanwhile, it is considered rude and uncouth to discuss death in the U.S., and though we all secretly know better, still we live our lives as though we will not all die one day (and that often sooner than we think).  That is, I think our failure to account for the inevitable comedown of the post-Holidays is symptomatic of our steadfast refusal to prepare for death itself.

We do the same thing in sports, as well: whereas the Olympics and the World Cup and other non-U.S. sports contests have 2nd and 3rd place awards as consolation prizes, in the Superbowl or the World Series, it's a zero-sum game.  You either win it all, or you are marvelously depressed the next day.  To be clear, European and Latin-American and other global athletes are just as bitterly disappointed in not getting the gold as their U.S. counterparts--but then, the rest of the world is also much more keenly aware of, and much less thoroughly insulated against, the inevitable failure of all things.

Death, destruction, downfall, and failure--of governments, of businesses, of revolutions, of levies, of health--is a much more widely acknowledged fact of life beyond our borders.  Hence, there is always a contingency in place--a Silver or Bronze, a Day of the Dead, an extra-long Christmas holiday--that helps you ease into the inevitable come-down.  In the U.S., death, failure, loss, always come to us like rude shocks to the system, as though it were a strange thing for anything bad to happen to us, as though it never occurred to us that "all things must fail" (Mor. 7:46) even though we know they always do.

Please don't misunderstand, this is not a call for fatalism or pessimism or cynicism or despair or depression in America, no, quite the opposite--this is a call to avoid the depression that comes from the inevitable come-downs, to be mentally and emotionally and spiritually prepared, by remembering to always look towards the final end.

My Kind of Town, Seattle Is

This last New Years Eve, as I walked towards Pike Place Market in Seattle, I had an experience I haven't had in years: I bumped into someone and we both said "Excuse me!" at the same time!

The past decade I've lived primarily in the Rocky Mountains and the Midwest, and I had gotten so used to hearing only dull silences respond to my automated "Excuse me's" in public, that it took me a sec to register my happy shock.


I was already in a good mood you see, thanks to the clean air so richly-oxygenated you can cut with a knife, and the glistening ocean, and the snow-capped Olympics across the Puget Sound, and the 40+ degree winter temps free from polar vortexes, and the Seahawks' latest Superbowl run, and the pretty girl by my side declaring that the waterfront reminded her of Zürich; but the mutual "Excuse me!" confirmed it for me--I've been away from the Pacific Northwest for far too long.

It wasn't just that one "Excuse me!" that sealed the deal, either: near midnight, I turned a corner and nearly ran into this tall dude.  He just patted me jovially on the chest and back and shouted, without a hint of alcohol on his breath, "Happy New Years man!" and marched on his way.  I'm told you have to go all the way to the Deep South before you find more people this unfailingly polite--but then, I'm not even sure "polite" is the right word here, for there's just this vivaciousness to Seattle folk, they're awake, they're alive.  One could argue that all big-city folk are energetic just out of necessity, but I guarantee I found more smiling faces on the streets of Seattle that one day than in all my visits to, say, Chicago.   

A note on Chicago: There's an old Frank Sinatra standard, "My Kind of Town," a love-letter to Chicago.   Now, I've been to Chicago--the Art Institute alone is worth the trip, the view from the Sears Tower is breathtaking, and Deep-Dish lives up to the hype. It's also dirty, crowded, crime-ridden, corrupt, either bitterly cold or visibly-humid, and flat as a pancake.  So, while I've enjoyed my visits to Chicago, I can't really claim to relate with the mood of "My Kind of Town."  That is, unless you swap out Chicago for Seattle--then that song makes perfect sense to me!

For I'm also informed that Seahawks fans are considered especially obnoxious--how that makes us different from the rest of NFL fandom, I can't fathom.  But, we are particularly loud, which apparently rubs some folks the wrong way, as though we were implying we loved our (until very recently) craptastic teams more than everyone else loves theirs.  I assure you that we had no such presumption in mind; it's not that Washington folk are loud sports-fans, you see, no--it's that we're loud in general!  To my friends who inform me that my voice carries, I assure you: in Seattle, I'm normal voiced.

Once while I adjuncted in SLC, a student came up to me and said that I reminded her exactly of her friend who is also from Washington; "Why, is he awesome too?" I rejoined, not missing a beat.  She rolled her eyes and said, "That's exactly what he would say too!"  These aren't people just gritting their teeth to get along, no--we all know how lucky we are to be from the Pacific Northwest.  It's like how Hawaiians rarely honk in traffic--it's not that they're overly polite, it's just, why get mad when you're already in paradise?  And when the fireworks went off spectacularly on the Space Needle come midnight, my girl finally understood why I never paid much attention to the Times Square ball-drop.  Why go to New York when we already have Seattle? It's a place where you can unironically sing:

Now this could only happen to a guy like me
And only happen in a town like this
So may I say to each of you most gratefully
As I throw each one of you a kiss

This is my kind of town, Seattle is
My kind of town, Seattle is
My kind of people, too
People who smile at you

And each time I roam, Seattle is
Calling me home, Seattle is
Why I just grin like a clown
It's my kind of town

And each time I leave, Seattle is
Tuggin' my sleeve, Seattle is
Pike Place Market, Seattle is
Century Link field, Seattle is
One town that won't let you down
It's my kind of town!

William Gaddis predicts 2008 in his 1975 novel JR

"Stressing the vital necessity of expanded capital formation unimpeded by governmental restraints, Senator Broos' impassioned plea for a restoration on the part of the common man in the free enterprise system as the cornerstone of those s.o.b.s who still think winning's what it's all about give them a string of high p e ratios and a rising market it's all free enterprise all they howl about's government restraints interference double taxation, all free enterprise till they wreck the whole thing they're the first ones up there with a tin cup whining for the government to bail them out with a loan guarantee so they can do it all over again..."  (William Gaddis, JR, 1971, pg. 683)

2015: Happy Back To The Future Part 2

Strap on your self-tying shoes, grab your hoverboard, feed your Mr. Fusion, guard your Sports Almanac, and hop in a flying Delorean: Ladies and Gentlemen, it is now 2015! In 292 days, Doc Brown, Marty McFly, and Jennifer Parker arrive back to the future--that is, October 21, 2015.  The future is officially now.