The Jolly Green [g]od

My Dear Reader,

Our celebrity class is one of the most morally corrupt groups of people on Earth. We all know it; the evidence is there every time we turn on the television, or read the newspaper, or get on the internet. When it comes to morality in the celebrity class, things are topsy-turvy with respect to the rest of the nation: deviance is the norm, morality is the minority. In this day and age, you have to go looking for the decent people among the celebrities. We watch them spit on religion, drink until they vomit, sleep around, cheat on their spouses, divorce-remarry-divorce, do drugs, beat their girlfriends, and break the law in more ways than we knew were possible.

So why do we let these people tell us what to do?

Why do we let these people tell us how to vote or what to buy?

Why do we let these people tell us that we are bad people of we don't do what they want us to do?

I bet you could come up with plenty of ways that these same celebrities (and remember, the more morally corrupt ones are the ones who get the most attention) influence us. But recently these people have come off their sets and catwalks and have planned a new way to get into our heads, and it just flabbergasts me. They have decided that they are all going to come together and tell us that we are bad people if we don't, as they say, "go green."

Now, I'm not anti-green. In fact, I believe that one thing The Holy Bible teaches us is that God gave us the Earth and charged us to take care of it (Genesis 1:26-28, 2:15). I just think that there are limits. Bruce Wayne knows what I'm talking about:

Yeah, that's right: people come first, Lady. You tell her, Bruce.

Anyway, without debating the merits of the green movement itself, I have to say that I've been concerned when I see that those who are the most vocal about going green just happen to be the worst offenders in the morality department. It probably wouldn't bother me if they didn't get all high and mighty about it, as if they had the credibility to tell us the difference between right and wrong. According to them, if you don't buy the right light bulbs or put your thermostat they they want you to, you're a bad person. It's like getting a lecture on chastity from a person who is in the act of committing a bank robbery. No thanks, Buddy. I'm not taking directions from that moral compass.

After all, the green movement isn't a substitute for the kind of moral structure that is traditionally found in religion. There's not some jolly green god that says that it's okay to drive drunk if you do it in a hybrid. These are the people that told us not to judge them on their choices. These are the people who told us that we weren't allowed to tell them how to live their lives. If we did that, we were bad people. So when did it become okay for them to judge us, and say that we're bad people because we don't all have solar panels?

Whether global warming is what it's supposed to be or not, it's incredible (read: unbelievable) that we give certain people a free pass, only to let them come back and wag their fingers at us. I say that we don't let them. I say that we make our decisions on our own, and not because they told us what to do. I say that if they ignore our way of life, we're free to ignore theirs, if we want.

Of course, I also think that they should have just done the right thing in the first place, but that's just me.

Oh, and am I the only one who's gotten sick of the word "green" already?

Regards, best wishes, and making good choices at all times, in all things, and in all places,

-Cecily Jane

The Stove Principle

My Dear Reader,

I've recently spent a little time as a Sunday school teacher for the gospel essentials class in my ward (read: congregation). It's been an interesting ride. When I went to BYU, I was required (and very much loved) to attend religious courses taught by the finest religious scholars Mormonism has to offer, and we spent a lot of that time learning the details about the scriptures. In contrast, as a gospel essentials teacher, I had to spend a lot of time thinking about the most basic principles of the Mormon faith. After taking the vast and very complicated scriptural account of God's interactions with humanity and boiling it down, I was surprised at how simple it all really is, and how much I learned from that simplicity. One of the many very simple things I've learned is something I like to call "the stove principle."

The stove principle is a metaphor I made up to explain why God interacts with us the way He does. It comes from when I was a very little girl, and I would watch my Madre as she cooked on the stove. I'm sure you, Gentle Reader, have a memory very similar to this. As Madre stirred a pot or brought water to boil, I used to look up at the stove in amazement and wonder. Many times, I tried to reach my hand so I could feel what was going on up there for myself, and every time, Madre would say, "Cecily, don't touch the stove!" No matter how many times I tried, I'd get the same answer: "Cecily, don't touch the stove. I'm serious. Stop it."

I remember that it used to make me so mad that Madre was so darn bossy, you know? I mean., what right did she have to tell me what to do? I was five, after all; I'd spent years and years on this planet already. Couldn't I decide whether or not I could touch that stove for myself? What was she trying to keep from me, anyway? I was pretty sure that as soon as my fingers met that shiny surface, candy would start raining from the sky. I thought it was going to be one of the best experiences of my life. So one day, I waited until she wasn't looking, and I went and touched that stove.

Bad idea.

My burned fingers taught me one lesson: when you touch a stove, it doesn't rain candy. As I look back over the years, I realize that another lesson was in play there: a loving parent will put rules in place in order to prevent you from hurting yourself.

As a child, I had no real understanding of what the word "burn" meant, and I had no reason to suspect that touching a red-hot surface would be so damaging. If I had, I would have never made the choice to touch that stove in the first place, right? That brings me to God, figuratively.

God is really, really smart. Like Madre, He understands the way the universe works better than I ever could, and thus, He knows every possible way there is for us to hurt ourselves. Oh, does He know.

Now, since God is our Heavenly Father, and since He loves us, He strongly desires us to be healthy. The problem, of course, is that we are often too ignorant of the consequences to our actions to realize when we're hurting ourselves in the first place. Most self-destructive behaviors don't burn as fast as a stove, but instead, simmer slowly over time. God realizes this problem, and since He cares about our well-being, He puts rules into place with the express purpose of preventing us from hurting ourselves. We call these rules "commandments."

Now, it's natural to dislike commandments. It's normal for us to think that God is trying to boss us around or keep something from us, and meanwhile, Satan is whispering to us that if we break those commandments, it will rain candy. More often than not, we are too ignorant to understand why the commandment is there in the first place. Compared to God's understanding, we're all infants, and a lot of things don't really make sense. But if we were smart, and if we trusted God to have our best interests at heart, wouldn't we just do what He tells us, and keep our fingers away from that stove?

A great example of this principle in action is found in Doctrine and Covenants 89:8, which I would like to paraphrase as the following: "Tobacco equals bad." We Mormons believe that God told this to His prophet, Joseph Smith, in 1833. At the time, it must have made absolutely no sense at all, don't you think? It would take almost a hundred and fifty years before we humans could figure out why smoking was such a bad idea, and some of us still don't get it. But God got it, so He tried to stop us from giving ourselves cancer. It's true: reading the scriptures can save your life.

Those who trusted God, yet didn't understand, did what He asked and reaped the rewards. The same is true of many of God's commandments. When we follow God's commandments, we stop ourselves from getting burned, spiritually and physically. If we're smart, when God tells us not to touch the stove, we won't touch the stove.

Anyway, I hope you found that simplicity as inspiring as I did.

Regards, best wishes, and healthy fingers,

-Cecily Jane

Everything Is Poison.

My Dear Reader,

I suffer from Alzheimer's, just not in the way you think. So do you.

When my beloved grandmother (and consequently, our whole family) fought a long and brave battle with the disease, I first became acquainted with the reality that a person can endure suffering from an illness that someone else has. Even after the battle is over and lost, the psychological effects remain. It's hereditary, so does that mean that we've got it? Do we each have to spend the rest of our lives fighting a disease that we may or may not have? If we don't, does it mean that everything we already went through was meaningless? That, Gentle Reader, is just more suffering. It's also the earliest signs of a nasty disease I like to call "Paranoia."

But, in a way, aren't we all suffering from all kinds of diseases that we've never even come in contact with?

When I was a kid, it seemed that my Madre put every food imaginable into two distinct categories: things that will give you cancer, and things that will stop you from getting cancer. I always wondered why everything I wanted to eat was in the first category, and everything I hated was in the second. I also wondered why none of the other kids seemed as nervous about their lunch.*

Now, it seems, everything either slows Alzheimer's down or speeds it up. And it's not just what's in your brown paper bag, oh no! It's cell phones, dairy, word puzzles, and chocolate. It's dyes, curries, and cholesterol. Yes, that's right: cholesterol may kill you, but it will also save your life. Next week, who knows what else will be added to the list. AIDS, maybe? Does AIDS cure Alzheimer's?

Remember when margarine was this great thing that all the smart people loved and the stupid people despised? Remember how it was going to stop heart disease and feed that poor kid in Rwanda? Remember how we then found out that margarine was just a big glop of poison? Poison, I say! Run back to your artery-clogging butter, citizens of America!

Now, I know that my Madre was dead wrong. The two categories aren't cancer and no cancer: we're not close to being that lucky. There is only one category: death. Everything in the world causes one horrible ailment or another. The only thing you can do is choose whichever kind of agonizing death seems the most friendly. It's like we're all in that Star Trek episode, you know? The one with the space hippies that made absolutely no sense until it turned into this cool allegory about the Garden of Eden? And where the Garden of Eden ended up just being a big ball of poison? That is the place we're living now. Poison Planet.

The Garden of Eden is poison, people. You heard it here first! Close that Bible!

Oh yeah, and this blog will kill you. Sorry.

Of course, the fact that we live on Poison Planet isn't all bad. As with every bout of mass paranoia, there are the heroes that emerge from the smoldering remains of sanity. Remember how celebrities used to be cold, unfeeling people who had no morals and spit at everything decent, but now, they're all cuddly people who hate breast cancer? Remember how before, you couldn't find a hand mixer in pink? I mean, even your M&Ms are fighting breast cancer now. Breast cancer is IN. Sometimes, I'm jealous of breast cancer.**

I mean, behind all of the scare tactics and the merchandising, have we completely forgotten that life, as a whole, is pretty good? Have we forgotten that true love still exists, and that babies are beautiful? We shouldn't. We shouldn't forget that a good, gracious God loves us enough to give us stuff as heavenly as cheese, chocolate, and air. I myself, am a big fan of air. I just can't get enough.

Raise your hand if you were just thinking about how air is going to kill you.

Darn it.

The truth is that my grandmother did die of Alzheimer's, that lots of people are in a lot of pain, and that I always buy the cancer-fighting M&Ms.**** The truth is that there's a lot of bad stuff out there that we're smart enough to know how to prevent, and if we can prevent something, we should. The point I'm trying to make is that we shouldn't unnecessarily burden ourselves by worrying about every disease known to man. I mean, there has to be a balance, right? There has to be a point where you should just eat the darn chocolate bar.

Otherwise, we're all going to spend our lives suffering from diseases we don't have.

So, just take a deep breath. Please? Nobody likes a Herbert.*****

But I like you.

Regards, best wishes, and a dash of sanity,

-Cecily Jane

*Thanks, Madre. How you had six children and still had enough energy to care about whether or not we ate our brussell sprouts, I will never know.

**If Edgar Allen Poe were still alive, he'd write this great short story about a secluded group of people who cured their breast cancer by infecting themselves with AIDS. Could you imagine how popular that would be when it was made into a musical? Of course, it would only work if Idina Menzel is in it.***

***Sorry, everybody I just offended. Sorry.

****I wish they made some that fought Alzheimer's, though I realize how problematic that would be. It's hard to fight something you also cause. How does cholesterol do it?

*****Did you get that? Really? I love you.

******Sorry about all the asterisks, people. I got a little excited.

Sister Moments: Another Wedding, Another Dress

My Dear Reader,

My sister, HermanaMayor, just got married. So out of the three of us girls, I'm the only single one left. If you are well-acquainted with Mormondom, you know that I now have a large target painted on my back. Do not worry, Gentle Reader. Any self-respecting Mormon girl who has had the audacity to graduate college without acquiring a husband knows several ways to dodge the when-are-you-getting-married question. Here's one example:

Relation: So, you're what, twenty-four? When are you getting married? Are you even dating someone?

Cecily: Did you hear that China's going to the Moon?

Relation: Wow, I'm thoroughly distracted.

Cecily: Yeah, I thought so. BWAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!!

So, no worries on that front.

You may remember that when PetiteSoeur got married, I wasn't too excited about the bridesmaid dress. This time, HermanaMayor made it easy for me: all I had to do was go to a website and buy this dress. Easy, right? I was pretty happy about it until it came in the mail. That was when I realized that instead of a dress, it was more like a stylish robe. It was a wrap dress, meaning that it had no way of fastening in the front. I tried it on the first time, and I thought, who designs a dress like that? Don't they know that a dress's main purpose is to cover the skin in between my shoulders and my knees? I don't care how pretty it is, if it can't clothe you, it has failed. FAIL!

But the dress was already bought, so what could I do? It did look pretty good on me, after all, and it's not like I could tell the bride that she should pick another dress after all the other bridesmaids have already bought it. (I tried, it didn't work. And I felt like a really big jerk.) So, after coming to terms to the fact that I was stuck with a failure of a dress, I put it away, and forgot about it for three months.

Note to future bridesmaids: this is a bad, bad idea. Never forget about a dress that you're required to wear later. Ever.

So, the day of the wedding came up, and everything was going just great, right? I mean, you know, for a wedding. I had just taken a shower and was doing pretty well on time when I got out my dress to iron it and discovered that it wasn't in my closet, where it was supposed to be.

Oops.

I looked three times in my closet, it was nowhere to be found, which was just great. I had bought it so long ago that I couldn't remember for sure if I'd actually put it in my closet in the first place, and add to that the fact that objects tend to sporadically appear in and disappear from my room*, and it seemed impossible to ever find that dress again. It was too bad that I was going to a place for the express purpose of being photographed in it. It seemed that I was going to single-handedly ruin the most important day of HermanaMayor's life. Awesome.

We looked everywhere. Every closet, every nook and cranny, every conceivable hiding spot. Nothing. Eventually, I had to just give up on it and head to the photo shoot. My lovely, gracious PetiteSoeur offered to let me wear her bridesmaid dress, while she assembled something of her own that looked almost similar. Why a screw-up like me ended up with a sister like that, I'll never know.

So I went to the temple to take pictures. In a blizzard, it turned out. Snow was coming down like it was going out of style, in Oregon, of all places.

The reception was the next day, which meant that I had just a little more time to try and find my uniform, and hopefully, not completely ruin everything. Of course looking for a piece of clothing is somewhat difficult when Padre wants you to go the venue to help Madre, and Madre wants you to go home to get out of the way, and Padre calls you while you're on the road to go to the store and buy pitchers. By the time I got back home, I had about ten minutes to look for my dress before I had to start getting ready. Blarg.

I didn't expect to walk in the door and find out that PetiteSouer and Schwager had located my prodigal dress. It turns out it was in the coat closet the whole time, and since it was black, opened at the front, and had a collar, it had fit right in with the other coats. It blended in so well, in fact, that they only found it after searching that closet multiple times. So, I got to wear the dress to the reception, and everything else was happy ever after. Once again, I don't know how I could deserve a sister like PetiteSoeur. Or a brother-in-law like Schwager. Or a sister like HermanaMayor, who was very gracious about the fact that I was single-handedly ruining everything on her special day. I'm a big dork, you know.

So yeah, that's more drama than I ever thought I'd have involving a dress. It's definitely more than I ever thought I had to write about one.

So, Gentle Reader: if you're going to be a bridesmaid, know where your dress is! Trust me, when the business of a wedding is going on, you don't want to be the one who screws everything up. Leave that to one of the little brothers.

Oh, and BTW, wrap dresses work just fine when you have a friend/sister who is willing to help you safety pin the fabric in place. Just so you know.

Regards, best wishes, and sisters,

-Cecily Jane

*One of the many tragedies of living at home is that you have absolutely no control over your own belongings. None. People just come in, shove your stuff around, reorganize it, take it, hide it, add their own junk to it, and there's little you can do about the whole thing. I probably shouldn't care anymore, but I feel like it's one of the few ways of expressing adultness that I have left. It's futile, I know.