Mary Versus the Trumpeting Legions of Apathy

Mary Leah Hedengren recently passed away due to natural causes. For example, a heart attack. Lots of people die from heart attacks, very suddenly, and sometimes without any previous medical symptoms. Or a brain aneurysm. That's another good one. She could have died from a brain aneurysm. Anyway, the point isn't which natural cause it was, but that is was a natural cause. Totally natural. Au naturel, as the French would say. Natural as could be. More natural than the produce section in a hippie co-op. That natural. Nothing suspicious about it at all. Just your run-of-the-mill, completely possible, however tragic, naturally occurring natural causes. Ms. Hedengren lived an entirely normal, not suspicious, totally safe life. She was born on September 11, 1984 in Provo, Utah, didn't do anything that might cause chagrin to any unsavory characters, and served a full-time mission for the LDS Church. She loved laughter, writing, and not getting involved in over her head in dangero...

I'm a middling quantity procrastinator. An amaturcrastinator, as they say. But I think I have some useful quality procrastination tips. Let us begin: 1. Don't procrastinate between something you love and something you hate. Either you can grade papers or you can work on your paper. Not grade papers or eat ice cream, because you know which one will win out. 2. If you must procrastinate with something you love, make it something kind of gross, and do it to excess. After 4 hours of reading People magazine, you'll be disgusted enough with yourself that writing a paper seems like a good change of pace. 3. Procrastination can be a fine creative method. Procrastinating by writing stories, drawing, etc. can inspire some of your best work. Your mind slips around looking for anything to keep you from filling out that application and sometimes it finds pure gold to distract you. 4.Two can procrastinate better than one. Visit someone who should be doing better things and you can di...

http://www.fourlokostories.com/?page=1 And therefore.... http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/17/alcohol.caffeine.drinks/index.html?iref=NS1

So it's Thanksgiving, when a young girl's heart turns to the destitute. In my neighborhood, we have a good congregation of homeless, because the street by my house connects the two major freeways. I always feel uncomfortable when they walk past my car, holding out a hand and a sign. There's the initial awkwardness of being panhandled, but also there's the awkwardness of being a Christian and, even more damningly, a Mormon. In the Book of Mormon, King Benjamin said in no uncertain terms that we're beggars of Christ and that we can not ignore the destitute without jepardizing our own salvation. Of course, when this verse comes up in Sunday School, it always leads to some discussion of whether those who panhandle are really the worthy poor. Of course, I'm an economist at heart and so I'm skeptical of the incentive structure of panhandling generally. Am I paying off my guilt? Are the homeless earning money through emotional blackmail? And then I develop elaborat...

First off, (I mean after the usual Sunday stuff, like translating for Natalia, a Russian sister in the family ward Relief Society), I was asked to give a talk in sacrament meeting. Don't get me wrong--not a problem. I love public speaking. This time, though, in addition to just mulling and then writing and outline and then winging it from the pulpit, I decided to try something new and actually write the talk down. Once, when I was a sophomore, someone asked me for a copy of my talk and I was obliged to admit that it was notes on a napkin. Not that I'm cocky enough to expect my 10 minute talk to go into circulation, but I wondered if I might experiment with the Spirit and seek the right words at my kitchen table in front of a computer, instead of the chapel in front of the congregation. Granted, this took a lot more time, hemming and reading aloud, trying to figure out the correct diction, but the plus side was, when, after the first speaker rambled just a little, the second spe...

1. Stay home. 2. Sleep a lot. 3. Drink tons of fluids. (what else can you drink? morphasolids?) I favor hot herbal tea, crystal light, a couple of those truly nasty Airborne things. 4. Get better. (5. Play four hours of Plants vs. Zombies.)

I remember Erasmus as an European-history-question answer, but I had never really read his stuff until this last week. And now I have another dead man crush. As you might suspect, In Praise of Folly praises folly. (Well, aside from a side-jot to satirize religious hypocrites.) But folly's become a bit of a bosom-pal of mine recently, now that I'm letting myself be foolish in important ways. Erasmus I ain't, but here's my own addendum to the praise of folly. 1-Folly makes me audacious. It's folly that keeps me from "keeping my fool mouth shut" when meeting influential people. It's folly that made me track Walter Benn Michaels to where he was eating lunch and folly made my little first-year-graduate-student self challenge his economic assumptions. Folly made me submit to journals way above me, conferences I don't belong in, contests I can't win, and positions I'm not qualified for. And though there's been plenty of falling on my face, ...