Fathering Sam

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by MAB:

"Why do you want me to bleed daddy?"

This is what my then 5-year-old son said to me late one afternoon. For the third time I had told him to come inside to get ready for bed. When he didn't respond I grabbed the rusty old watering can he was playing with and headed inside, fuming about my paternal incompetency. Pausing at the back door, I realized that I didn't want to take the rusty old watering can in the house so without thinking I tossed it back toward the play area. As I did so, the handle broke and the can flew in a different direction striking my son's forehead. He started bleeding immediately and we were both shocked. When he noticed he was bleeding he asked me why I threw the can at his head and why I wanted him to bleed. I explained it was an accident but he was still very confused and in pain. I was crushed by his words and my actions. I couldn't get in touch with my wife, so I found a baby sitter for the other two kids and took him to the emergency room to get stitches, and to endure the questioning stares when he told the nurses and doctor that I threw a watering can at his head.

Almost a year later we were at a parade when a pirate ship came though firing off an extremely loud cannon. This scared my son so badly that he jumped in my lap and hugged me very tight for about five minutes as the spectacle inched past and out of range. I hug my children every day if I'm not away on a business trip but there was something different this time. I felt forgiven and I felt like he trusted me to protect him. I felt his trust in a way that I'd never felt before.

About two years later we are hosting my brother-in-law and his family as they visited our new home city of Amsterdam. It was the week before Christmas and we decided to visit the festive city center. There were hordes of people doing last minute shopping and enjoying the sights. About an hour into our adventure my sister-in-law noticed that our child count had dropped from 7 to 6 and we discovered my boy was missing. We quickly retraced our route but after 10 very long minutes of searching he was nowhere to be found. Fears entered my mind as we fanned out down crowded sides streets and alleys. At one point I imagined him alone sitting in some dark alcove crying for his family. As I passed each building my worries grew as various scenarios – none of them good – played out in my head. Then, in the crowd I saw two officers coming my direction and they had my son between them. I ran to him and picked him up without saying anything to the officers. I took him in my arms so I could make sure he was all right. I tried to ask him how he was doing but I was so emotional all I could muster was an inexplicable donkey bray that embarrassed my son.

What do these stories have in common other than my middle child? It's hard to describe but I think it has something to do with depth of emotion or perhaps emotional peaks and valleys you experience as a parent. You hear that parents love their children the same but I'm not sure that's true. I love them all tremendously and maybe the quantity is the same but the quality is different. And when I say quality I don't mean good vs. bad quality I mean the nature of the love seems different. With my middle child, at least for now there are lower lows and higher highs and although things have plateaued as of late I get the feeling that events are being foreshadowed and that fathering him will always be a roller coaster.

Please share similar stories or share your thoughts on mine.


MAB has fond and therefore suspect memories of living his pre-teen years in rural Central Utah with his five brothers and one sister. As a teenager he moved with part of his family to the suburbs of Salt Lake City then left for a mission to Honduras. After barely surviving that he went to college in Rapid City, SD then married an open minded Californian who helped put him through graduate school in Seattle. He currently resides in Amsterdam with his wife and three children and has a hard time figuring out if he'll ever leave the land of bikes, canals, tulips and clogs.
Image credit: Pierre Lognoul (used with permission).

MMM Library: 9-11 Remembrances

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by Seattle Jon:

What do you remember? Leave a comment ...

Seattle Jon
I was an investment banker in Baltimore on 9-11. I was at my desk when the first and second planes hit the towers. I remember the guy who sat across from me (he was also LDS) turning around and saying, "Hey, there are planes hitting buildings in New York." When the third plane hit the Pentagon, he turned around again and said, "Dude ... I think this is the end of the world." His statement sent chills through me. Soon after, we went down to the trading floor where we watched both towers fall on fifty television screens. It was horrifying to think what our headquartered colleagues across the street from the towers were going through. Baltimore essentially shut down, and I was only able to get out of the city because I knew a few cabbies. I spent the next few days glued to the news, worrying about my wife and daughter in Utah.

Scott Heffernan
I was on a mission in Bristol, England on 9/11. We happened to be tracting door-to-door when the attacks began. We knocked on a woman’s door, introduced ourselves as missionaries, and she curtly told us she was not interested. As we were walking away she said, “Wait…Have you seen what’s going on?...I think you better come in.” We watched her TV in shock and confusion as the first tower burned, a plane crashed into the second tower, and then both towers collapsed. It was a heavy, heavy day and the mission changed a great deal after that.

Apocalyptic Modern Nostalgic Mysterious Jurassic Landscape Paintings from Sweden

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by MAB (bio)

So, I was wasting time again on the internet when I stumbled upon some paintings that I find unusually intriguing. I didn't find them myself though, they were discovered for me by an organization I follow called The Fox Is Black. It could be that the paintings are especially interesting to me because I just came back from a short business trip to Stockholm and because I recently read the post-apocalyptic book Wool. My hunch is these two events put me in a mood to admire the paintings by the Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag more than any painting I've seen in a long while. And that's actually saying a lot because I've not seen the paintings in-person and yet I just came back from a trip to the beautiful Kröller-Müller Museum where I saw many masterpieces including the second largest Van Gogh collection in the world. It's hard for me to describe what I like about these paintings though. They seem complex and simple, joyous and somber, retro and modern, urban and rural as well as a host of other dichotomous descriptors that I will spare you because I did not attend art critic school. I'm curious though, fellow readers; what do you see in Stålenhag's paintings and how do they make you feel?

To see a more complete collection go here: simonstalenhag.se

Happiness Makes You Unhappy

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by MAB (bio)

So says Garrison Keillor of the Prairie Home Companion radio show. Maybe, like other things in life, if you get too much happiness you become unbalanced. In my experience with lessons at church it seems we occasionally claim that life is easy if you are LDS with a clear plan of happiness and an iron rod to hold on to. But in other lessons we extol the virtue of overcoming trials that are an essential part of life, and maybe as peculiar people we have more than our fair share. Sometimes we preach that God blesses his faithful children, other times we preach that where much is given, much is required - including challenges that may not be fun to overcome. Is it just me or do we have a dichotomous view on happiness and how often we should expect it?

Regardless, I enjoyed Garrison's light hearted take on the subject of happiness in an episode of Lake Wobegon that I recently listened to.

Here are a few lines from the episode:

"Misery makes us happy."

"They (Garrison's relatives) were very happy in Pasadena. They talked about this when they came back. And happiness made them tedious, as it always does."

"Happiness is narcissistic essentially, isn't it. It's sort of infantile."

"Happiness makes you unhappy ... in the end."

But as a general rule you shouldn't read Garrison Keillor, you should listen to the masterful story teller.

The player below should skip to the Lake Wobegon segment at 81:35 when you click the play button.



First time listening to Garrison? You're welcome.

Bones, Microphones and Apple Sticks

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by MAB (bio)

I was putting my son to bed tonight and not listening very closely to what he was telling me when I suddenly realized he was talking about bones, microphones and apple sticks. Realizing I had a microphone on my phone I decided to record our conversation. I was not disappointed, as I found out what keeps my tormented child awake at night.



I hope your children do not go to bed thinking about remote-controlled ghosts that fly through your face, eating your brains on the way - but leaving enough brains for you to see the eyes of invisible monsters closing in on you.

I Sense a Disturbance in the Nuclear Family Force

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by MAB (bio)

Behold the nuclear family.

I was thinking about this metaphor recently: the family as an atom. I guess my incomplete thoughts began to crystallize when I discovered the interesting "atomic structure" of my son's friend's family. But more on that later.

First, let's consider the metaphor a bit. I know this is a silly thing to do, since most metaphors break down under even the slightest scrutiny, but in this case at least it helped me dust off a few neural connections made 20 years ago in high school chemistry. Apologies in advance to those who know more about this than me (and there are many of you), I will likely make some wild leaps through my flawed logic and incomplete knowledge, but hope to have some fun along the way.

So, if the family is an atom then I guess the parents are the nucleus, mom is a proton and dad is a neutron. Or vice versa, I'm confused about this. I made the dad the neutron since (1) it weighs a bit more and (2) from the pulpit on Mother's Day I seem to hear that mothers are the biggest force for positive good in the world. On that sentiment I'm neutral (ha!). That leaves the kids as electrons orbiting the parents. In our house, at least, they still weigh less than us, which fits the model, and when they aren't playing video games they orbit us in antics and laughter. To take the metaphor further, we often know their position but not their momentum (what will he "be" when he grows up?), and when we try to inquire into their lives we inevitably change their trajectory. So that's the uncertainty principle and the observer effects in action. I think this metaphor could go further with quantum mechanics invoking fields of influence, etc., but I'll leave that up to the theoretical physicists. Same goes for the Higgs Boson as the God particle, that's just too easy-hard.

That makes the traditional family a Helium atom, which depending on the number of your children, leaves you in a variety of states:

Electron children	Family charge and notes
0	Your charge is -1 and you are eagerly seeking a child
1	Your charge is 0, you're noble but your kid is spoiled - everyone knows that
2	Your charge is +1
3	Your charge is +2, beyond this point there is a good chance your kids will fly out of orbit
...	...

Note that if you are single you are a Hydrogen atom and your electron is a dog or a cat. Or, if you are divorced, I guess it could be a child.

Okay, that was all probably ridiculously over-thought and even callous at times. So I think I should stop with the metaphor and just use normal words to describe "exotic" elements I've seen over the years, elements that defy the standard model of nuclear families.

I Was Doomed to Read This Horrible Book

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by MAB (bio)

I have this affliction where I usually cannot stop reading a book once I start, no matter how bad it is. I say 'usually' because there are books I've read parts of but didn't finish. But nearly all of my unfinished books are by-products of dates or vacations. Let me explain.

When we were first married we went on 'dates' to bookstores because it was cheaper than a movie and we loved to read. They were odd dates, I will grant you that, because we would spend a few hours in different parts of the book store as our literary tastes do not always converge. We rarely bought any books, but just read whatever we fancied hunched down in an aisle somewhere. Aside from 'date' books, there are unfinished vacation books scattered in relative's houses, lodges and cottages we've stayed at, but whose final pages were not met before it was time to go.

Once a book enters my house for a longer period and I crack its cover, I usually read it from start to finish regardless of the content and quality of the writing. This affliction recently played havoc in my life, and during the holiday season no less! My dear readers, I will now tell you a little about this book so that you will not pick it up unawares, and if you are afflicted like me, be stuck reading all 500 pages.

The book is called Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. The book won some awards and has a sci-fi element, so I thought I would be safe. The book is about a young time-traveling historian who tries to go the middle ages, about 40 years before the plague hit Europe. But uh oh, something goes wrong. I bet you can guess what. I guessed (nearly, but close enough) what went wrong on about page 10, but due to my affliction I had to read the next 490 pages where some semi-interesting things happened but the writing got in the way of its explanation. In fairness, the book kind of gave a vague sense of what it would have been like to live in a small village during the plague. Oh, and the author kind of does a few weak twists on good and evil. But don't let that tempt you into reading the book. You can do much better.

My wife on the other hand can pick up a book and stop reading it at anytime, never to pick it up again. She just gets tired of the book and moves on to something else on her long 'to-do' list. In other words, unlike me, she does not feel compelled to read a book once she's started. One other odd reading behavior she has (which I think is a little blasphemous) is she reads the ending ... first! That's right, she often reads the end of a book first to see if she wants to spend time reading the entire book. This is not what authors intend and her habit is one of the many things that prevent me from writing a novel. I'll not let her read the ending of my book without going through the whole thing, chapter by long chapter.

So, I put a few questions out to MMM readers. Do you have to finish a book once you've read even a small portion of it? Do you ever 'cheat' and read the end before you get there? I have a feeling this is all explained by some economic theory, perhaps loss aversion, which probably means I shouldn't start frequenting casinos. Any other theories?

Had a Good Cry Lately?

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by MAB (bio)

Crying Men by David Prior

I cry about once every four years. I guess if I kept a journal like a good Mormon I would be able to recount these important events with better accuracy. Off the top of my head, here are the events that made me cry in the past twenty years:

• A passage in a book about viruses (My wife loves to tease me about this even though it happened before we were married. The passage was about the size of viruses compared to super clusters. I was overcome with a sense of scale, my insignificance in the universe and the complexity of life.)
• My first child's birth
• My grandmother's funeral
• My aunt's funeral
• And most recently, a movie (juicy details below)

The subject of crying has been on my mind recently because I had a good solid sob about one month ago and I just came across an interesting experiment that is documented in the great video below.

But first, here's my cry story. I was on a work-related, twelve-hour, night-time flight from Amsterdam to Hong Kong. Anxious for the work ahead, I couldn't sleep so I decided to watch an in-flight movie. The first movie that peaked my interest was Moonrise Kingdom. I watched the movie, and it was great, but no, Moonrise Kingdom was not the movie that made me cry.

Not feeling completely exhausted yet, I looked for another movie and this time found Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. The movie didn't just make me cry, I was practically sobbing. I think the guy next to me, as well as his daughter, got a little worried and uncomfortable. I blame it on the movie's plot and subject of course, but also on the fact that I was tired and leaving my family for two weeks. I think the plot was that much more difficult for me because it featured 9-11 extensively and I've been outside the U.S. for over a year. So, on top of missing my family, I felt homesick and disloyal to my compatriots.

Taking things a bit lighter, here's a movie about four guys who compete to cry. It has a surprise ending. Then don't forget to answer my questions at the bottom of the post.


The Crying Competition (part 1) from Brent Hoff on Vimeo.

I fessed up to my recent sob ... what caused yours? Men, do you think (as implied in the movie above) that we are vastly inferior to women in our ability to connect to our sensitive side?

Here Come the (Cultural) Mercenaries

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by MAB (bio)

Pena National Palace, Sintra, Portugal

We just got back from a four-week vacation that included extensive travel in Europe. Some of the highlights, of course, were trips to castles and museums (enjoyed by the adults much more than the kids). Europe is unique in that you can travel relatively short distances to experience a variety of ancient and modern cultures.

All that culture got me thinking about my time as a missionary in Honduras. Since I was born and raised in the U.S., and had only been to one border town in Mexico for a day, I was eager to soak up the new culture despite the inevitable "culture shock." And it was shocking at first. But eventually I adjusted. But there is a deeper level of history and culture lying just beneath the surface. I think this is true of anywhere, even for a mission in ... Ohio for example.

I'm a fairly immature person to this day, but was much more so back then. If I had been more mature, had done more research and had a better understanding of history and culture, I think I could have enjoyed the people and my time in Honduras even more. But perhaps I am not fully to blame. My mission president would rarely let us do anything other than missionary work (and we had the standard four or five books we couldn't deviate from). I presume that's still the case in most missions. It would be nice if missionaries were given culture time so they could travel, with the objective of gaining a better understanding and appreciation of the people they serve.

Mouse Killer

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by MAB (bio)

Since we moved to an apartment in Amsterdam nearly a year ago, we've had a little mouse problem. Apparently it's nearly impossible to not harbor a few of the pests when living in this old city with its old buildings. One of the many perks, I guess, of living the exciting international life.

One of the first things I did was go out and buy a couple of those old-fashioned mouse traps. The kind that are difficult to set and apparently don't work very well. At least not with our mice. I would wake up in the morning to find they had cleaned off whatever I put out as bait but nothing was ever caught. 

After a few weeks of inadvertently feeding them off the traps, I stopped my attempts and decided to just let them be. I figured they were just cleaning the crumbs off our floor anyway. But over time I got this nagging feeling that these mice were direct descendants of the mice (or was it just the rats?) that helped spread the Plague. No, there are no fleas so my fears are irrational, but still mice are supposed to be dirty right?

Anyway, two days ago I entered our shower room (showers and bathrooms are separate here, long story) which is all tile and leaves little egress for adventurous rodents. While flossing I caught a glimpse of a wee mouse from the corner of my eye. It was trapped in a tiled corner with no where to go.

Saltair, Why Do You Give Me The Creeps?

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by MAB (bio)

Like many a good Mormon, I spent some time in and around Salt Lake City. I haven't been back though for more than seven years. What's keeping me away you might ask? Well, one thing is the Saltair Pavillion. That mysterious palace of salt sends chills down my spine. Now, I'm not normally a fearful person, so the effect that edifice has on me is a bit mysterious. It periodically haunts my thoughts even though I've never been there, just drove past it a few times as a teenager.

Do You Ever Get The Urge To Move Far Away?

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by MAB (bio)

About six months ago we moved from stormy Seattle to stormy Amsterdam (Holland).

So what's different here? Well for starters I frequently substitute Speculoos for peanut butter on PBJs or I just eat it straight from the jar. It has a strange power over me. I ride my bike to work every day alongside half the other residents - this burns off some of the Speculoos calories. Nearly everyone else is on a bus, tram or train. When the natives speak it sounds like they are clearing their throat before, during and after each sentence. The architecture and the canals are amazing in this city founded hundreds of years before Columbus reached the Americas. Everything is different here, either subtly or drastically.

It’s complicated trying to explain why we wanted to move and in the process, leave behind our good friends and family. I think my mission in Central America has something to do with it. The experience of being in a new culture and gaining a different perspective on life made me want to do it again. I also want my kids to have the experience, which is partly why they are in a public Dutch school instead of the private International schools. The culture shock has not been easy for any of us, but I think it will be a worthwhile experience as we learn many, many things about ourselves and others.

When we broke the news about our move to our friends and family, most were supportive. A few, however, were perplexed as to why we would ever want to do such a thing. So that made me wonder why some people want to live outside their native country but others do not. I know it's complicated if you think about the details, but generally speaking, I wonder what makes a person a homebody vs. a wanderlust. There certainly isn’t anything wrong with people who want to stay put; in fact, moving your family halfway across the world is stressful and a little insane.

Do you have the urge to live outside your native country? Why or why not?

Agency in 1Q84

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by MAB (bio)

I just finished reading "1Q84", a thousand page novel by Haruki Murakami. I've read four of his novels now and couldn't put any of them down. This, his latest novel is probably my least favorite though. I'll talk a little about the book but won't give anything important away.

The book follows a girl "Aomame" and her eventual boyfriend "Tengo". They first meet in grade school but only say a few words to each other and very briefly hold hands. Shortly after Aomame's family moves to another part of Tokyo. Many years later they realize they are deeply in love with each other and always have been. It's a good love story (note: R rating) with a healthy dose of magic realism. I'm no expert on love stories but I would bet the grade school fling that comes back to haunt young adults is a common theme. One book that used this to great effect was "Love in the Time of Cholera." So, to delayed love gratification, add some Romeo and Juliet style star-crossed love baked in the magic realism oven and you get 1Q84.

There is much I could write about in the book. For instance, Aomame has a spiritual awakening at one point. But for me it wasn't as thought provoking as it could have been. I had no desire to slow down while reading about it, like I did when reading Ivan's religious thoughts and discussions in "The Brother's Karamazov".

How To Save A Life

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by MAB (bio)

When I was about eight years old my older brother had leukemia. The news and subsequent treatments were a hardship for the family and my brother's health did not improve. To save his life the doctor's began a search for a bone marrow donor. Another brother ended up being a match and was able to donate. After a very intense three month process my brother pulled through against the odds.

That experience left a big impression that has stayed with me throughout my life. In fact in college I studied cancer quite a bit and thought about working in cancer research. But I didn't end up in medical school and I didn't get a PhD so what could I do? The answer came over 10 years ago when I donated blood and saw that I could also sign up to be a marrow or stem cell donor. So I went through the easy process of getting on the registry. That involved a simple blood draw. Once they have your blood they work out all the complex markers that make your cells unique. If someone needs a stem cell transplant (bone marrow transplants are now less common thanks to recent advances in medical technology) finding a match is much more complex and less likely than finding someone with your blood type.

The Evolution of My Faith

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by MAB (bio)

Tadpoles are awesome. This young one here is just barely growing its front legs. I used to catch them as a child in rural central Utah and watch them as they grew legs, lost their tail and turned into frogs. I like the fact that they disprove the notion that swimming creatures can't evolve and walk (or hop) out of the water.

I was a fairly typical latter-day saint boy in small town Utah. I went to church every Sunday and tried to pay attention. I was well versed in Book of Mormon stories that my teachers told to me. When I got into high school, though, and took the standard physics and biology classes, everything changed. Learning about genetics, and evolution especially, was a significant and powerful experience that affected me much like a religious awakening. I began to wonder about the discrepancies between scientific and religious thought. Many things were insignificant, and easily reconciled. But questions remained, and when I asked people about them I either got conflicting information or was told I would have to wait to get an answer.

9-11 Remembrances

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by Seattle Jon (bio)

image via lookingattheleft.com

What do you remember? Leave a comment ...

Seattle Jon
I was an investment banker in Baltimore on 9-11. I was at my desk when the first and second planes hit the towers. I remember the guy who sat across from me (he was also LDS) turning around and saying, "Hey, there are planes hitting buildings in New York." When the third plane hit the Pentagon, he turned around again and said, "Dude ... I think this is the end of the world." His statement sent chills through me. Soon after, we went down to the trading floor where we watched both towers fall on fifty television screens. It was horrifying to think what our headquartered colleagues across the street from the towers were going through. Baltimore essentially shut down, and I was only able to get out of the city because I knew a few cabbies. I spent the next few days glued to the news, worrying about my wife and daughter in Utah.

Scott Heffernan
I was on a mission in Bristol, England on 9/11. We happened to be tracting door-to-door when the attacks began. We knocked on a woman’s door, introduced ourselves as missionaries, and she curtly told us she was not interested. As we were walking away she said, “Wait…Have you seen what’s going on?...I think you better come in.” We watched her TV in shock and confusion as the first tower burned, a plane crashed into the second tower, and then both towers collapsed. It was a heavy, heavy day and the mission changed a great deal after that.

Kyle August
I was a freshman in high school and had just started attending early morning seminary. We were reading something as a class when "the late kid" came in, interrupted us, and said, "I was watching the craziest movie! Planes were hitting buildings. It was nuts." We didn't pay him any attention and returned to our reading. After seminary, I hitched my usual ride and entered my high school. Normally you could hear a loud buzz of socializing going on, but when I opened the door it was silent. I remember thinking that school must have been canceled, but then I heard a news voice. As I moved toward it, I saw hundreds of students gathered around every TV in the school. Everyone was watching and not saying a word to each other. I spotted a friend and asked him what was going on. He didn't say anything. He just pointed to the TV. TVs stayed on in every classroom all day. We really didn't get much done.

Pete Codella
9-11 happened the day after my wife and I brought our first child home from the hospital and on my wife’s birthday. We lived in Henderson, Nevada at the time and had just struggled through a sleepless night when my sister-in-law phoned to ask if we had seen the news, and no, we didn’t have the TV on at 6:50 in the morning! Amid the realization that our lives had forever changed now that we were parents, we were forced to deal with the fact that terrorists had figured out how to launch a pretty successful attack on U.S. soil. It was a new world. I lived and worked in Manhattan from 1996-97 and went through the Trade Center on my way to work at the World Financial Center every workday. Plus my wife’s sister (a different sister-in-law than the one who called) was studying at NYU at the time, so we were all concerned as to her whereabouts. She was impacted like all New Yorkers but not in danger of harm. It was surreal to realize that a place I had frequented almost daily for two years, and could have been in on that fateful day, was now destroyed. We celebrate 9-11 in our family because it's the day my sweetheart was born, long before terrorists destroyed the World Trade Towers.

Dustin
I had recently returned from my mission and was attending BYU-Idaho. I stumbled out of bed a bit late that morning to find my roommates glued to the TV. As I poured a bowl of cereal, they told me that one of the twin towers was in flames and that an airplane had apparently hit the building. I was shocked, but didn't grasp the gravity of the situation until the second tower was hit. "This can't be a coincidence, right?" I asked. I'll never forget how I felt when I found out the source of the attacks...dismayed, angry, vengeful, and, in spite of being in one of the most remote locations in the U.S., unsafe.

MAB
In 2001 I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area, and was asleep when the first plane hit the World Trade Center on 9-11. My alarm clock was set to a local news station and it was typical for me to wake up, listen to the radio for a minute and then hit the snooze bar a few times. That morning was no different. Each time the alarm went off there were anxious voices, and I eventually understood through a sleepy daze that one or two planes had hit the WTC in New York and it seemed serious. At that time we didn't have a television, so not knowing what else to do, I got ready for the day and headed in to work. Like everyone there, I was glued to my computer trying to understand what was happening. I wasn't getting much work done since the magnitude of what happened made my routine activities seem trivial. By noontime there was so much information and speculation flooding in via the internet that our CEO sent an email and told everyone they could go home to be with their families.

Max Power
I can't say anything overly interesting about where I was the morning of September 11, 2001. I awoke that morning to the phone ringing--a friend calling to tell me to turn on the news. At that point, only United 11 had hit the north tower, and everything still appeared to be some confusing, inexplicable accident. I distinctly recall the startling wave of realization that crashed over me as I watched, live, the second plane, United 175, make an unnaturally sharp turn and slam into the south tower. It was remarkably clear to me at that point that something was terribly wrong. My recollection of that surreal scene, as well as the disbelief I felt as the first tower fell, will probably never leave me. For me, 9/11 serves as one of a handful of moments of uncomfortable revelation in my life, where something I once treasured is irrecoverably gone. Like discovering that your parents are semi-annually defrauding you every Christmas and Easter. Or like the jerk who put razor blades in candy bars one halloween and ruined the event for everyone, forever, because the thrill of amassing an obscene hoard of candy is somehow spoiled by parents sorting through your stash and discarding anything that isn't hermetically packaged. I hate the fact that I really want to watch the 9/11 Tribute in Lights from the Brooklyn Bridge this year, but I am too afraid to be around major New York landmarks. And I miss the feeling of invulnerability we used to have, a uniquely American sort of naivete that war and civilian life can be neatly separated, with war cordoned off on a foreign battlefield thousands of miles away and insulated by oceans and the innocence of never before being attacked on our turf. That all went away when we watched planes flying into buildings.

Aimee
I was three weeks away from entering the MTC to leave on my mission to Sendai, Japan. I had wrapped things up at my job and was taking it easy until I left in early October. I was still asleep when my brother-in-law Tyler who was living with us at the time, came into my room to tell me I needed to come watch the news. I could not believe what I was witnessing on that tv screen. What had happened to the world while I was peacefully sleeping? Both towers had fallen and the news was recapping the events and filming the awful aftermath. With a heavy heart for the victims, their families, and our world, I sat in my pajamas on the living room floor watching the coverage the rest of the day.

Am I Just a Bunch of Synapses?

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by MAB (bio)

I think I'm just a bunch of interconnected neurons. The essence of who I am, seems to me, to be nothing more than that.

I don't know what to make of the commonly held belief that we are made of body and spirit that together form a soul. It doesn't make sense to me for a few reasons. Take sleep for instance. If I have a spirit that forms the essence of who I am, makes decisions and so forth, then what happens to it when my body sleeps? Personally, I think my brain goes through the various sleep cycles, I dream, etc. But rarely do I remember what happens while I sleep because of course I am unaware or semiconscious. It would seem that if I had a spirit it would not need to sleep and would continue to be aware even though my body slept. I know there are a lot of very smart people researching how our brains manage all the sensory data, make decisions and so forth to create an overall stream of conscious. That research, like a lot of brain research seems to be in its infancy so maybe things will make more sense as new information becomes available.

Another reason I am baffled by the body + spirit = soul concept is because the essence of who we are seems to be tenuous. I think our personalities can change in drastic, permanent and nearly instantaneous ways that shouldn't, to my way of thinking, apply to immaterial spirits. Obviously, we mature as we age so that's one form of change. As we mature we probably make wiser decisions. Drugs can also change a personality. Steroids are an easy target here with their common side effects such as aggression. Do steroids make a spirit more aggressive? If so how do drugs (material) impact the spirit (immaterial)? Could it be that our spirits are filtered through imperfect bodies and come out distorted? That seems less likely to me for some reason. I think psychoactive drugs change body chemistry and the way a brain works. To my way of logic that's the reason someone behaves differently. A brain is behaving differently, not a spirit. Drastic and nearly instantaneous changes in a personality can happen after injury to certain portions of the brain. Another sad example is Alzheimer's disease, where victims exhibit personality change as the disease takes hold of their brains.

To me the idea of a soul is perhaps incorrect, incomplete, or maybe just oversimplified. But there is a good chance I don't understand the idea of a soul very well. I certainly don't understand precisely how a brain works.

1:7, a Rough Easter-to-Christmas Decoration Box Ratio

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by MAB (bio)

For family home evening I was sent out to the garage to find the Easter decoration box. It was hard to find among the Christmas decoration boxes. Decorating for Easter took 30 minutes. Decorating for Christmas takes 3 months. To me the balance doesn't feel quite right.

Image courtesy of Scrapologie Blog.

When CTR Gets Complicated

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by MAB (bio)

I recently finished a New York Times bestseller “Justice, What is the Right Thing To Do?” a book by Michael J. Sandel, Professor of Government at Harvard University. My wife saw it at the library and checked it out thinking one of us might have the time to read it. I saw that it covered some aspects of philosophy, which is a recent and probably short-term interest of mine, so I dug right in. It’s brief at approximately 275 pages but it took me about a month to read because I continued to read other books and also started to learn Dutch. I add those details to help provide context to this post, the context being that I didn’t pay too close attention to what I was reading. You now have every right to roll your eyes, but before you move on to something else let me say that the book was quite interesting and I’m certain I can pull some concepts out that will make this worth your while.

In the beginning Sandel gently exposes the reader to basic philosophy and poses some of the classic conundrums for consideration. In the rest of the book he does two important things: first he gives the reader a framework of philosophical perspectives upon which modern day moral questions can be considered, then he analyzes current moral debates through one or all of the perspectives.

The first perspective is Utilitarianism (Bentham), which states that to determine the right thing to do you calculate how to achieve the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people. This however could lead to the unfortunate hypothetical situation where one person in a city is tortured for no other reason than to make everyone else happy. Which leads us to the next perspective.