Nine Months With a Dumb Phone

Tweet

by LJ:

So there was this one time I went from an iPhone 4 to a Nokia brick phone for nine months.

I downgraded because I was too tight-fisted to pay retail prices for a smart phone and because my inner hipster was reveling in the return to simplicity. (Or maybe it's my inner Luddite. Hard to tell.) I would eschew the time-suck of constant Internet access. I would curb the narcissist that lurks behind every Instagrammer. I would be better than all of you.

Let me spoil the ending for you: I am back in a smart phone. I took this photo with my Droid, which has a far better camera than the fancy point-and-shoot I bought in 2007. I texted it to several people, put it on Instagram, and then reveled in the validation that came rolling in.

So much for a return to simplicity.

However, this has been a return to convenience. This phone obeys some simple voice commands and frankly that makes me a little giddy. I can tell the robot inside to call my husband and it dials him for me. It makes a friendly pinging sound whenever someone validates me on social media or--even better!--tells me where the nearest QT is so I can get a giant cup of crushed ice. (Yes, I don't get out very much.)

All that being said, I don't regret the regression to Dumb Phone. It acted as a kind of reset for me, a chance to clear my head and realize I was becoming a total screen monkey. With my little umbilical charger cord severed, I spent 300% less time on the Internet. I called people instead of texting. I rediscovered how much I hated texting with T9. I paid more attention to my kids. I read more books.

Now that I find myself back among Smart Phone users, I have to find a balance. I can appreciate voice commands, the fancy camera, picture texting, mobile Skype and Voxer. (Seriously guys, it's an app that turns your phone into a walkie-talkie, which should appeal to the 5th grader in all of us.) I can also turn it off, put it down, and remember that my time is too precious to spend constantly losing on Candy Crush.

How do you find a balance?


Laurie Jayne (LJ) Stradling began her writing career with horrible grade-school poetry (the kind with illustrations in the margins). She has since moved onto blogging and the occasional piece of fiction, which has improved slightly since she gave up the illustrations. LJ is a quiet feminist, a loud mom, a well-kept wife and a fervent believer in prayer. She also believes that most dogs came to the earth after the Fall of Adam. Twitter: @lauriestradling.

It’s a Small (Mormon) World

Tweet

by Eliana:

I have a recurring dream, maybe two or three times a year. I walk into sacrament meeting and see a new family. New to the ward that is: an ex-boyfriend, his wife and a pile of kids. In the nightmare it is just awkward all the time, not dramatic, but I don’t really want a calling with this woman and don’t want to share a pew with a man who broke my heart.

We all know the do you know? game in Mormondom, based on mission or where you once lived. The weirdest part, the reason we keep doing it despite the long odds, is that often we meet someone we are connected to. I’d like to share three stories of my own about the small, small world of church members. Some are great moments, others an unwelcome blast from left field.

• Freshman year in college at BYU I had five roommates. One of them mentioned my name to her father on the phone. Yada yada yada, he and my dad were mission companions. Interestingly, both had first daughters whom they gave weird names to. More interesting were the stories from both parties.

LDS Women Are Incredible [Novelists]!

Tweet

by Theric Jepson:

.

This year it's #GamerGate; last year it was Ohio football players. Although most of the reliable numbers say that women are doing much better on most hard measures, culturally, here in the U.S., a lot of men are still ******s. And we can't look at men threatening to kill women who wear pants to Church and claim that we as Latter-day Saints are untouched by this ugly aspect of our culture. Alas, our sad experience matches Joseph Smith's: it appears to be "the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority . . . [to] exercise unrighteous dominion." And let's be honest: we men hold a substantial percentage of the Church's power, nice little bromides notwithstanding. The problem of course is that it can be difficult to really understand what it's like to be a woman in the Church when you are, in fact, a man in the Church. But! As science proves (literally, Science), reading fiction can increase our empathy, help us understand others, make us better people. (I'm stretching the findings a bit now, but an increase in empathy fits my definition of "better people" pretty well).

And so, to increase the Modern Mormon Man's performance as a decent human being, I present some fiction. Three novels written by two LDS women that can increase our understanding of their lives and those circumstances unique to them and separate from us.

Paso Doble and We Were Gods by Moriah Jovan

Moriah may now and then claim to be nothing more than a bawdy romance novelist, but those of us who've read her know better. With her latest pair of books, she explores the adult lives of twins Victoria and Étienne. The first novel deals with the sister, the second with the brother. But it's equally true that this is a pair of books about how women can get lost in the cultural prescriptions placed upon Latter-day Saints---the first novel about a single woman past her twenties, the second about her sister-in-law who married young.

Both books feature typical Jovanian heroes who take up as much space as Greek gods. Each character is bigger and better and broader than the last, and their clashes are epic.

Victoria, the first novel's protagonist, is brash and thoughtless and no longer has any expectation of marrying. She's too old and has too much personality. Her romantic conflicts within the Church lead indirectly to her being ostracized from the Church when she begins dating a celebrity "manslut." Victoria's extended virginity (and the white-knuckled grip with which she holds onto to it) lead to some of the most educational passages about female sexuality I've read---and her thinking about her role as a Mormon woman are similarly enlightening.

Saintspeak 24: The Letter S, Part 3

Tweet

by Seattle Jon:

Another installment from Saintspeak, the mormon humor dictionary from Orson Scott Card. Previous installments can be found here. Reproduced with permission from Signature Books.

Spirit Prison  Where the missionaries will finally get to visit all the people who never answered their doors.

Set Apart  The point of no return: Once you're set apart, you can't turn down the calling.

Stake  An organization with no congregation. Half the people in your ward that you think are inactive or dead just have stake callings.

Stake Conference  The famous Mormon Mother Survival Test, in which participants are required to tend at least three children for two whole hours, struggling to keep them quiet on metal chairs in a room with an incredibly loud echo. There is no requirement that mothers be sane afterward, or even ambulatory. They only have to have a pulse and still be able to find the Cheerios bag within five minutes upon request.

Stake House  The old term for a stake center. It was changed because too many nonmembers were getting the wrong idea about what Mormons did on Sunday, for what they heard was: "Oh, I've just been over to the steak house."

Handbook of Instructions (1940): Raffling and Games of Chance

Tweet

by Seattle Jon:

My youngest brother gifted me a 1940 Handbook of Instructions issued by Heber J. Grant, J. Reuben Clark, Jr. and David O. McKay. At 170 pages, the handbook is much shorter then our current versions (Handbook 1 alone is 186 pages) and contains some interesting rules, regulations and language which I'll share over time.

Raffling and Games of Chance

The attitude of the Church with respect to raffling and games of chance is clearly expressed by those who have and do now preside over the church.

President Smith said, "Raffling is a game of chance, and hence leads to gambling. For that reason, if for no other, it should not be encouraged among the young people of the Church."

President Young declared raffling to be a modified form of gambling and said that "As Latter-day Saints we cannot afford to sacrifice moral principles to financial gain."

President Lorenzo Snow endorsed and approved of these statements when he said, "I have often expressed my unqualified disapproval of raffling."

President Grant says, "I have always understood that our people were advised to raise their money for charitable and ward purposes without indulging in raffling, where chances are sold. There is no objection to creating competition in various ways in ward entertainments in order to raise money, but the selling of chances on any article has been discouraged."

It is urged that the spirit of these instructions be followed and the element of chance eliminated in efforts to raise money.


Seattle Jon is a family man, little league coach, urban farmer and businessman living in Seattle. He currently gets up early with the markets to trade bonds for a living. In his spare time he enjoys movies, thrifting and is an avid reader. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University and the Japan Fukuoka mission field. He has one wife, four kids and three chickens.

LDS Succession Considered to Excess

Tweet

by Sam Orme:

Listening to General Conference a few weeks ago (which was fantastic, and available in full online, and you should go back and read or re-read it all) got me thinking about the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The most recent addition to the quorum was Neal L. Andersen, who replaced Joseph B. Wirthlin upon his death. That made me stop and wonder: who did Elder Wirthlin replace? I did a little digging and found that he replaced Spencer W. Kimball.

I started to imagine the quorum as a table surrounded by fifteen chairs (twelve members of the quorum plus the three members of the First Presidency, who are also Apostles). When one member of the quorum leaves, his chair is moved to the back of the line of seniority, and someone takes his place. It's the same chair, though, in this scenario. You could imagine that Elder Andersen moved into Elder Wirthlin's office after it was vacated. So what if each man who sat in that chair, or worked out of that office, carved his name in it? What would those lists look like of who sat in each chair over the years?

It's a little trickier than you'd think, as it turns out. The quorum began with twelve members, but the practice of replacing members was much more fluid in the early days of the Church, and the practice of having three members of the quorum (again, for a total of fifteen) serve in the First Presidency didn't really gain steam until the early 1900s, so getting an exact sense of who is taking which seat and which seats are empty for the first sixty years or so was challenging. But that's no reason to back down, right?

We start with the original twelve members of the quorum, in order of seniority. Let's number each of their chairs around the table (or offices at Church HQ, if you'd prefer):

1. Thomas B. Marsh
2. David W. Patten
3. Brigham Young
4. Heber C. Kimball
5. Orson Hyde
6. William E. McLellin
7. Parley P. Pratt
8. Luke S. Johnson
9. William Smith
10. Orson Pratt
11. John F. Boynton
12. Lyman E. Johnson

Those are the twelve chairs we'll be carving names into. (The remaining three chairs come up a few years later, shortly after the death of Joseph Smith.) (You'll notice Joseph Smith's name doesn't appear on any of these chairs; he was never properly a member of the Quorum of the Twelve.) I'll spare you the chronology of men moving in and out of these seats, but just list below each seat's history. To me, at least, it's really interesting to see which seats had many occupants and which had few, as well as the relative prominence of each seat's occupants. Take a look:

Seat 1
Thomas B. Marsh
Lyman Wight
Charles C. Rich
John W. Taylor
Orson F. Whitney
Charles A. Calliss
Delbert L. Stapley
James E. Faust
Quentin L. Cook

Seat 2
David W. Patten
Willard Richards
Jedediah M. Grant
Daniel H. Wells
John Henry Smith
James E. Talmadge
Alonzo A. Hinckley
Sylvester Q. Cannon
Ezra Taft Benson
Jeffrey R. Holland

A Response to Bishop Mark Paredes

Tweet

by Kyle:

Hey Bishop Mark Paredes,

I’m not gonna lie, your article over at Jewish Journal was not cool. Like really not cool. Like “omg I can’t believe a bishop actually wrote this and thought it was a good idea to put it on the internet” not cool.

But that’s okay. I believe we all make mistakes, and we can more often than not fix those mistakes. And as a Democrat I believe that you’re just so incredibly wrong. But what I want to tell you is not how wrong you are about Harry Reid (I mean…do you even know him?), or how wrong you are about the Democratic Party (again, terribly wrong), but how wrong you are as a bishop.

You see, Mark, you’re a man with religious authority and responsibility. You oversee the saints in your ward, and you have authority over them. You have used your position in the church to spew some pretty harmful words that will put you at odds with your congregation. And by so doing, I believe you have tainted the very calling in which you serve.