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...