Mary Versus the Trumpeting Legions of Apathy

Here are some more of the weird things I've found in my old notebooks. Ah, what a youth I was..! Go child-- my mother said to me-- go and and wash the poop from your shoes. Take paper towel and stick and hose and wash the poop from off your shoes. For Adam's sake was all man curses that pleasures might a price demand And for a day's wanterlust and romp, to spray one's treads out will suffice. For simple pleasures, and carelessness, a simple recompense is made. So go and use the outside hose and wash the poop from your shoes. *** My lad, I'm glad you've some to stay And watch the house while I'm away Before I go, just let me say Don't poke the monster. If you're feeling bored and dull Play hide and seek with the mad troll or eat moat frogs until you're full But don't poke the monster. And if it's really dreadful weather Tie medusa's heads together and tickle her with griffen feather But don't poke...

 Mr. Gimley was 64 years old, his mother peacefully passed away. Mr. Gimley mad ethe funeral arraignments, spoke at the eulogy and grieved the appropraite length of time. Then he retired early from his high position at a successful insurance business, sold his house and his condo in Florida, and moved into the orphanage. "Excuse me," said mean Mr. Stiles, the director of the orphanage, "you don't belong here." "Excuse me," said Mr. Gimley, "I'm an orphan." So Mr. Gimley ate gruel for breakfast .... and lunch.... and dinner. He dressed in patched rags with torn hems. He scrubbed the floors with a toothbrush. He played stickball (but not as well as the other orphans) He learned long division under kind Miss Stu and cheap walletmaking under mean Mr. Stiles. When Christmas came, he savored every section of his orange, with was naturally his only present. "Gee, Miss Stu," he said. "being an orphan ...

This morning I woke up at around 5:15 am. This was because my upstairs neighbors were noisy, but mostly it's because of stress. We Hedengrens get insomnia from the other direction. None of this stress is that big--it's not like "how am I going to feed my babies?" stress or anything, but there's a lot and of different kinds. Some of my stress is "good stuff happening" stress: visiting my brother, getting a visit from a friend, throwing an awesome Halloween party, getting invited to many good activities, planning a huge trip to Morocco. Some of my stress is stress I've brought on myself, chickens coming home to roost, and are also pretty good: my novel's finishing up, I got a revise and resubmit on an article and an "accept with revisions" on a short story (I know, right?), and I'm applying to academic jobs as a "practice run." On top of this, I have all of these goals I set for myself, the number of hours of service I...

So in light of the great talk in General Conference by Elder Nelson on bodies, I'd like to give a little shout out to my own body, which is pretty remarkable. I love the doctrine that body and spirit are soul and that our use of our bodies can determine our destinies. I like my body. Here are some specifics. These are my legs. I'm very proud of them lately because when I went for a bike ride Saturday night, I fell trying to maneuver around a small child in the road. and do you know what my legs did? They got up. Nay, they sprang up and got on the bike again almost instantly. You may notice the bandaid on my left knee. I scraped a bit there and there's a bruise on my other leg and I didn't even notice until well into my ride. This, incidentally, is not the first time my remarkable legs have sprung up after a fall; just a couple of weeks ago, the exact same thing happened after I tripped on a root while running. Well done, legs, well done. This is my rig...

So last week I got to watch Back to the Future for the first time since I was, I don't know, twelve. It's still a pretty great movie, and especially in the coming-of-age, sci-fi genre, with far more quotable moments than I remembered. It was a blast and a half. But. The end of the movie is kind of disturbing. When Michael J. Fox comes back (...to the future!), his city, the city that was clean and economically prosperous in the 1950s, is back to being graffittied and depressed. The sign that we know we're back in the 80s is that the Delorean distrupts a man sleeping under a newspaper by a park bench. Fox gets out of the car, sees the adult theater downtown, the boarded up shops and knows--he's home! Some of this is just reflecting the rosy nostalgia for the 50s that is typical of the boomers, but I'd have hoped that some of that meddling in the past would have impacted the whole city's prospects. Even disturbingly, does the fact that the city is run-do...

This is a very fat dog I walked today at Austin Pets Alive! It's so hot here that it's only in the early morning you can walk these dogs. This is probably one of the coolest things I do.

Pardon the awkward selfie from my last long bike ride, especially because it doesn't really match my rant. On this ride, I ran out of sidewalk, so I rode the grass, not the asphalt. Wanna know why? Bikes aren't cars. I know the hard core types, especially in South Austin like to ride in the middle of the street, back peddling to stay upright at red lights with their little bubble helmets (if any) but bikes just aren't cars. Here's my list of complaints about why it's not reasonable to suggest that bikes just act like any other motorized vehicle. 1- We can't accelerate as fast as cars, which means that at traffic lights it might take us a little while to get up to the speeds that the people behind us are itching for. 2- We get tired. Sometimes this getting tired will mean that we can't go as fast, or accelerate, up hills, on tricky terrain. That's bad, but it's also bad because when people get tired, they get a little stupid. Getting tire...

It's possible I'm an evil genius, but I'm a genius. Beach Blonde Popcorn 2 Gallons of popped popcorn, kernels removed (or more depending on how sweet you like it) half of the big container of white dipping chocolate 1/2 a bag of butterscotch chips 1/2 a bag of toffee chips You know what to do:  spread the popcorn out on waxed paper, melt the dipping chocolate then spread it over the popcorn, toss in the toffee bits and butterscotch chips and coat evenly. Then promise yourself that you won't eat it while it's still not cool. Break that promise. Love life. This is the popcorn I would have Cornecopia make if they hadn't changed their stupid rewards program. Now I only can earn IMAX tickets with my rewards. Lame. They're depriving the world of good popcorn.

So it's been rainy and I've been grumpy, but I do have a few things to be proud of this week: 1- I told the yoga teacher who had us listen to jarring music that while I normally like such music, I'd prefer something a little more mellow for the pm flow class instead of just passive aggressively holding it in. 2- When I stayed up WAY too late one night I used that time to clean out my drawers & filing cabinets. 3- I did go to bed on time one night this week. 4- I've gotten a little work done on my dissertation, even though it hasn't been always easy. 5- I graded all of my students' close readings in one day. 6- I went to happy hour with the admitted visiting students, even though it would have been easy to just go home. 7- I was able to say "no" to something I really wanted to do on Saturday because I knew I had prior commitments and I didn't want to over-schedule myself. 8-Had a really interesting, open and personable conversati...

We all agreed that Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer was racist. At first, we hated her, but then, after I taught a lesson citing Gramsci and Memmi on cultural hegemony’s persistence in determining individual attitudes, we only pitied her. Poor well-meaning, white, liberal racist. I opened up the class to include our discomforts in reading July’s People , a piece of speculative fiction written in 1980 about what the fall of Apartheid might look like. It’s a post-apocalyptic story where the apocalypse is Black Africans getting power. We read some sections where Gordimer describes the “descent” of her white protagonists as they adjust to life in a small, traditional Black village and shook our heads in appropriate discomfort. My French student said, “I’m not used to feeling white guilt, but this book, I definitely felt it while reading.” Maybe Gordimer was a white, liberal racist, but we could pity her.             I told my stud...

I have a very complicated relationship with Las Vegas, and by Las Vegas I don't mean the normal, real-people Las Vegas, I mean WOOO-HOOOOO, LAS VEGAS!! like girls in straw cowboy hats and little short shorts leaning out the window of a Hertz rental car at 2:00 am while stuck in traffic on the Strip. I like regular Las Vegas, the pretty landscaping of the temple, the good people I've met from there. But Woo-hoo, Las Vegas? I have a sympathy for it, even an affection. That being said, I wouldn't touch it. It's almost exactly the same way I feel about a stray dog in the third world. I spent this last week in Las Vegas at a convention for the College Composition and Communication group. English teachers. Here's our tattoo offer: And here's the sweet party up in the Stratosphere, a hotel best described as "scrappy." We did have a DJ and bright lights and lots of food.  Speaking of food, here is some of the many unhealthy foods of which I partook...

This last month, after spending sweat, tears and $14.00 in supplies to make a tiny jean picnic quilt, I realized that it's just not worth it. Which is a hard thing to realize when you consider that I've carefully saved, cut up, and moved my t-shirt squares to Texas on the hope that finally, finally I was going to make my sentimental college t-shirt quilt. This is the face of my BYU physics professor. Someone in class did the art and collected quotes for the t-shirt. Aw.....Divine Comedy t-shirt. The big pink one. Hell Run t-shirt Plant museum at the Bean museum Summer statistics camp at UT. They gave us models and cookies Run for Kiva--"teleraces" are terrible. Turns out sentimentality is a pain. So I took pictures of the squares I cared about and then {wince, grimmace} threw them away. My great aunt Dona would maybe be disappointed, but probably not. I have a good job, I can buy blankets, and I get frustrated when they don...

Once I was crossing at the light and overheard a conversation ahead of me. "Do you remember Sean Maher?" "Who?" "That hot guy from Firefly--the doctor." "Oh yeah." "I had such a crush on him and would totally be his girlfriend--but he's gay!" "Oh no way! Dang it!" I smiled to myself, but I really wanted to tell these girls: I don't think the thing keeping you from being Sean Maher's girlfriend is his sexual orientation. I'm not sure exactly which circles she runs in, but from the conversation, it doesn't sound like she is hanging out with Sean and his friends on the weekend, going to the fro-yo place, and playing Mario Kart in the dorm lobby. But then, we talk about celebrities, I think, as types. Pink is the party girl with the heart of gold, the best friend from junior high you stick with even after you've become radically different people. Kate Middleton is the bratty, but beautif...

(I wrote a long email with friends about the Prodigal Son. It was so long that I'm repeating it here.) Why are we talking like the prodigal son got shafted? He never got shafted; didn't his father tell him "Son, thou art ever with me and all that I have is thine"? This is huge because: (1) "Son" --the Prodigal wanted to be a servant and was flummoxed that he got to be a son. Here the father reaffirms to the Other Brother that he is a Son; he's still got that honored role (2) " thou art ever with me" There's a talk by Eld Eyring (I can't find it online, but it's in his "to draw closer to God" collection of discourses) where he talked about his mission companion. He had a companion who was, like, 70 years old, had been inactive for something like 50 of those. Little Eld Eyring was teaching a lesson on repentance and said something like, "you can repent and be just as good--isn't my companion jus...