You see, some years ago my dad sat me down and told me what he (and by extension my mother) thought about what I was doing with my life. What I was not doing, or had not done, was get a degree, have a career, or be married and have a family (or at the very least, be dating seriously). In fact, on the last one, I was not dating seriously, had dated the girl (previous to the dad conversation) entirely for her looks, and broke up with her because she said, and I quote, “You know you love me,” and I had to think about it and when I thought about it for a long time and realized that I “liked her” but certainly could not apply “love” to the relationship I broke it off and she ended up dating another guy and getting married and, even though the conversation preceded her dating the other guy and getting married, caused my sister to talk to my dad who decided it was time to speak to me which in turn turned into a three hour one-sided conversation outlining the three main themes from above.

When I shared these three things with my classmate, and I use these three things because everything else that my dad told me that night are merely extensions of these three main items, he reiterated his question, “Is this your first bachelors degree?”

My answer to that question is, “Yes,” and (unspoken), “BYU does not admit students into a bachelors program who already have a bachelors degree.”

I said, “I started attending BYU in ‘97 and realized that I was not taking my education seriously and pulled myself out of school to focus on other areas.”

His response, “If you can recognize you are not taking school seriously, why didn’t you change the way you approached school.”

I said, “I had other priorities, I still have those priorities, and as a result, those priorities were far more important to me then, and now, then everything except for my wife and child and family.” I then said, “Over time my priorities changed [and this is why]…” and then I outlined the three points my dad shared with me when I was 29: no degree; no career; and no lasting relationships.

The outcome was that I decided, in a very small period of days, that it was time to make some radical changes in my life. I drove to where my parents live and had a second “conversation” with my dad, but it too was one-sided and a repeat of the first one and my dad restated the same three major problems I was having and, even more upset than after the first conversation, solidified my desires to change, but in different ways than what I think my parents had anticipated.

As an aside, I drove by my mom’s work and stopped to say, “hello,” and, “goodbye,” to her before I left town and, ostensibly, left immediate contact with either parent. The outcome of this was, first, that I told my mom the same thing I’d told me dad a few minutes before, “My friends have asked me to move with them to [insert location]* and I think I am going to move,” and got a different answer from my mom than from my dad. Dad said, “No you’re not,” and he was right only as far as location, we did not move to [insert location]* but ended up somewhere else. My mother said, “Is this what you really want to do?”

Later on, my mom would have a more formal conversation with me about that conversation where she informed shared a couple of family experiences with me that illustrated events where it is appropriate for parents to intervene in children’s lives and that, as an adult, even though time and situations were very different, both of my parents felt it was appropriate to intervene because what what I was doing in my life was not healthy.

Knowing now what I didn’t know then, I think I was expected to give different answers. And yet, knowing what I know now, I had to make radical and hard changes to my life in order to be where I have ended up. Where am I now? Well, I am finishing my degree in one month. But, this is only indirectly related to the conversation with my dad. The direct connection is that I decided I was tired of being close enough where family members and parents could scrutinize what I was doing closely enough that they missed every single thing I was doing and then decided to make quantum leaps in logic to arrive at what I was really doing and then talk to me about what they thought I was doing compared to what I am actually doing. The indirect outcome is that when I ended up in New Hampshire, expecting to end up in Boston, I agreed to go back to school as a condition of living with my friends and their daughters and as a result started the process of getting the degree I was accused of not having. When I got serious about my education and realized that it was time to place education above occupation and as a result started looking at what schools would best offer me the education-to-cost I wanted. I applied to and was subsequently recruited by Boston University and I also looked into Harvard and other places, but, honestly, decided to make the decision based more on playing a game I sometimes like to play and stated something like (to my mother), “What would it hurt me to apply to BYU one more time?” I’d actually been turned down by BYU about four times and wasn’t certain I wanted to do it one more time.

One other things shifted inside of me when I made that statement, I started to plan a move from New Hampshire to Utah. I was offered a job that helped pay for the move and something I wouldn’t want to do for any real length of time. Finally, I came up with an alternate plan for my education if, and only if, BYU decided to reject me one more time. As a result, I had a plan, I had direction, and I had faith that something would happen, though I didn’t know what that something was other than that I would get a degree and figure out what was next.

The problem, though, wasn’t that I was working toward a degree but that I still didn’t have a career (nor a particular desire for a specific career) and I still wasn’t married and didn’t have a family. My desire, believe it or not, is to be on the east coast. I didn’t get excited to move back to Utah or to Provo. I did have the feeling, and this was rather persistent, that my time in Utah would only end after I’d found someone to marry. As a result of that persistent feeling, when people would corner me on why I moved back to Utah, I told them, rather universally (and flippantly), “I am here to get married.” And I believed that. However, even knowing or believing my statement, I have also lost some of the patience my parents have touted about me and after a summer of acting and writing for the stage I’d decided that after the Fall Semester I would move either to Salt Lake City or to Los Angeles, CA and I was leaning toward California.

Then the Fall Semester hit and I was taking a class through the philosophy department on Moral Storytelling. I noted Erin because she said she was from Massachusetts. That interested me. Though, admittedly, I didn’t expect much to happen even though I did think, repeatedly for some weeks, that I needed to get to know her, specifically, better. Except, I hadn’t been on a date in a couple of years, when I did date it was being setup by a girl who didn’t know me at all and insisted on setting me up with incompatible girls, and when I asked different girls out I would be turned down, all of this so that when I finally got up the nerve to try and insert myself into Erin’s life it was done so backwardly and awkwardly that I am surprised we dated, got engaged, that I flew to Massachusetts for New Years, met Erin’s family, was accepted, and eventually had a child together.

Meeting Erin solidified my staying in Utah and in Provo and at BYU. I was ready to leave regardless of what I’d promised anyone else.

So, by making the hard choices in my life, e.g. moving and then starting school and by extension removing myself from the full-time work environment, I met and married my wife and we started a life together and because I met Erin, we also focused my attention on getting a degree sooner rather than later. As a result of the conversation with my dad my priorities have shifted, though they have not changed, and I placed my education and the opportunities involved higher than I was placing a career or even the search for a career. The outcome of this rather complex relationship between New Hampshire, conversations with my parents, and returning to BYU and Provo and meeting, dating, and marrying Erin is that I have taken care of two of the three problems my dad decided to share with me. I have a degree (or will very soon), and I have a family.

What I don’t have is a career, so let me qualify that. I believe I have a career objective. The objective is to write. I can define further what I mean by writing, but without going into a great deal of detail about the process of getting from my goals and priorities all the way to my career, I want to write fiction. Writing for a corporation is an acceptable short term answer to my overall career goal; but, it is exactly that, a short-term answer. For the long-term, I am actually planning on more education and pursuing, to some extent, advanced education in two other areas, one more than the other**.

I am under no illusion that writing fiction as a career objective is, at best, foolish. There are far more up-and-coming authors than there are slots on a publishers schedule to accommodate. There are a lot of very talented writers. Every tom, dick, and sherry wants to be published and thinks about it and dreams about it. Making a living as an author is not always possible. Because making a living is not always possible, I realize that I have to follow other interests that have carried my attention for numbers of years. Because I know that providing for family is first, I will pursue more education beyond an MFA-Writing where I can teach at a very higher level within the college-university environment. I expect to find myself going to school for quite a few more years and learning things I have ignored or chosen not to follow before now. The outcome is that I am not done with school, my career is to write, and I plan to get more degrees that will allow me to translate what I am studying into what I am writing and supplementing all of that with teaching. In order to follow this, I pursue my goals and my priorities in a fashion that allows me to provide for my family and support my wife in her interests and endeavors.

As a result of making the hard decisions some years ago, I am now in a position where my dad’s critiques are not as applicable to my current situation and where I am better able to move forward both in a fashion that my parents might approve of, but also in a way that shows that life and experience has taught me something about how to live life and how to approach other people whose lives I touch in some way.

The outcome of a lot of things is that I believe in having an ideal. For me, writing is an ideal. For me, being married is an ideal. For me, having a family is an ideal. For me, providing for that family is an ideal. For me, pursuing my interests is an ideal.

I, like everyone else, live in a world of ideals. I also live in a world of reality and at some point one must marry reality with the ideal. The reality of a lot of things falls outside of the Puritan influences Good Box. They are ideas and directions and writing and a whole host of other things that define are not, by extension, wrong or inappropriate or evil or sinning. My having a different view of the world or even a different view of my religion than the classmate with whom I held the conversation that influenced this post, and having different ideas or even questioning why I believe what I do does not make me a bad person nor does it mean that I don’t believe that what is in the Good Box is any less valuable than the other directions I choose to pursue with my life.

For this classmate, the outcome was an argument that it is appropriate to allow my wife to follow her dreams for an education, a career, and for a life and that it is my job to support her in those areas and to help her be as successful as she can be. Because I believe things like this, I can also argue that it might be appropriate for Erin to pursue a career and for me to stay at home with the child(ren) and that our religious beliefs and even the Good Box allows for use to have this happen. And that it is specifically the influence of the cultural beliefs of the community that we would be judged if this is the path we chose to take.

At no time does this change my faith, nor does it change what is good or appropriate, nor does it affect ones ability to be an active and strong member of the LDS church or to serve when asked to. Rather, the way we pursue what we pursue in our lives and how we choose to communicate that with other people and in other places is tantamount to the way we choose to live our lives and by questioning whether or not the Puritan influence and the Good Box are the only way to live a religion.

Because my dad sat me down and told me what I wasn’t doing right I had the opportunity, and took it, to access what was happening and in some cases to be in different situations where circumstances caused me to make a right choice. Because I started making those choices I was able to get married. Because I got married I realize that even though there are culturally defined roles that are not set in stone and can be altered to fit our specific needs. And as a result of the changes in my life, the choices I made ten or more years ago and my priorities, and because I have goals and specific focuses these don’t interfere with my faith or religion or responsibilities and as a result of all of that and a belief that ideals are important, I can live my life and do what I need to do and still be the kind of person I think I am meant to be.

The outcome to the conversation was, in part, that I don’t fit traditional molds for education and for marriage and for a career, and just because it may not make sense to someone or that I would make decisions that might appear to be counter-intuitive to someone doesn’t make them counter-intuitive or wrong and that, ultimately, I have lived a life that is right for me. The outcome is that ideals are nice, but that we need to begin to accept that the things that lie outside the box can be nice and appropriate too.

*[insert location] is intentional and, “Yes,” I do know the location, and, “No,” I don’t care to share.
**not sure I am sharing this one, at least in this post.

Real Heroes Fly ]]> http://www.johnhattaway.com/2008/11/is-this-your-first-bachelors-degree/feed/ 0 http://www.johnhattaway.com/2008/09/the-exploration-of-love-in-relation-to-literature/ http://www.johnhattaway.com/2008/09/the-exploration-of-love-in-relation-to-literature/#comments Wed, 10 Sep 2008 01:50:02 +0000 smokingpen http://www.johnhattaway.com/?p=1048 I had a couple of girls, many moons ago, tell me that all stories can be distilled down to their essences and that would always result in a love story. Now, as a somewhat well read individual who ranges all over the stratosphere of writing when it comes to what read, I happen to know that there are some rather well known stories that immediately disprove the assertion that all stories are love stories, but in truth it is a nice and simple notion to make.

And, when considering the notion, often stories will use, as a plot device, love and relationships as one of the mediums that carries the story forward. Charles Dickens wrote Great Expectations around the notion that a young man, who helped a prisoner, starts to receive financial assistance from an unknown benefactor, believes it to be an old woman who has a niece that he might (or might not) be in love with, and who believes that, against character, the old woman is helping him out when in reality the prisoner, shipped off to Australia, discovered wealth and decided to help the young man. The story in part deals with the idea that the young man and the old woman’s niece might actually have affection for each other and ends with… read it to find out.

The point, though, is that we want our literature and our storytelling and our fictions to have something to do with our lives and what we want as outcomes. It is not wonder that, when you walk into a bookstore, and know what you are looking for, that there are very topic specific literature areas. You can have African American literature, you can have Gay and Lesbian (and yes, those two are often shelved together) literature, and then there is the literature that religious leaders explicitly tell people to avoid in the form of pornographic literature. You also have science fiction and fantasy (single subject shelf space) and Romance, and Thriller, which includes Mystery and Suspense, and then along one of the largest walls you will pretty consistently find general Fiction which will include Historical. Horror fiction includes urban fantasy (often), while Western is an island (often thrown at the end of Horror on a couple of shelves) all by itself. The outcome is a cornucopia of writing that a majority, in some fashion or another, can be distilled down to the elements of person A and person B meet, fall in love, and then have trouble either staying in love or staying together.

Read Romeo and Juliet. The Montegue’s and the Capulet’s don’t like each other. Romeo (boy) meets Juliet (girl) and they, tragically, fall madly in lust over each other and decide, separately, that neither one wants to live if they cannot live with the other one. The entire backbone of the story deals with the ramifications of boy loves girl (or person A loves person B) and outside factors getting in the way to stop or stunt the love. For those who don’t know, it’s a tragedy and the star-crossed lovers end up dead in the end. I would imagine there is a religious exploration of love and lust and union to be had in this story and whether or not the plan of God has anything to do with union (for the two if they were real and not a product of fiction) in the next life. Of course, you’d have to believe in God and an after life and the continuation of love to even want to go into the discussion and as a result, I will move on.

The entire nature of Romeo and Juliet is the exploration of love between the two kids. Neither has the actual capacity to make rational decisions that will ultimately work in their favor when it comes to the story, and yet, we allow for the idea that love is universal, two people in love will recognize the emotion, and regardless of age, true love transcends understanding or ability or experience and as a result, Romeo loved Juliet and Juliet loved Romeo. Of course, when Tolstoy decided to explore that theme in his work War and Peace, he had Natasha meet and fall in love with different men and then to kill of Andrew which sends Natasha into a major depressive funk (guess what emotional state I was in when reading the book???) all before she marries Pierre and ends up happily ever after.

Shakespeare followed the tragedy in his play, Romeo and Juliet, while Tolstoy followed the realization that love is fickle, that it comes and goes, and that an attractive girl like Natasha, though flighty throughout the bulk of the book, would eventually realize that Pierre was someone she loved and could love rather than someone who merely fancied her and she fancied. Love is not the overwhelmingly emotional outburst at the beginning of a relationship and to assume that you are always going to feel overwhelmingly emotional anytime you are near the person you love or are meant to love, you then presume that your relationship will end when the overwhelming feelings don’t follow.

Tolstoy weaves the relationships of his characters into the greater story, more of a history, of the Russian people that also encompassed the Napoleonic Wars. As a result, he doesn’t have the luxury that Shakespeare (or the REAL writer of Shakespeare’s attributed works) had in killing off his protagonist. Very lame. Well, not really. Every school child in the WORLD reads Romeo and Juliet and according to a professor I have, Shakes is also the greatest writer of all time, period and no takey backeys. However, what was essential to Tolstoy was to get to a point where his characters were wrapped up in the end and his work completed; where for Shakespeare the work was in the tragedy.

Even though multiple writers do use romance as an elements in writing and in some cases it is the dominant element in writing, take for example Nicholas Sparks who has no problem introducing and killing characters at whim, but whose sole purpose in life is to tell a love story; the art of telling the story is subsumed in the kind of love story he is going to tell and not in the other elements of the story. In one, The Notebook, the story is a story within a story where the protagonist is telling his wife about their relationship before she came down with Alzheimer’s or Dementia or whatever. It ends in death, but the essence of the book is life and connecting two people who, by all rights, should not be connected. Everyone works against them and… essentially what I am writing is Romeo and Juliet told through the lens of a lovelorn couple who did connect and did spend their lives together, but who, through genetics or biology, were separated.

If we were to look at other kinds of writing, Rule of the Bone comes to mind as a story that does not distill down to a love story. The protagonist is only interested in himself. Everything he does, in almost every area of life, is only meant to push his own agenda forward. He skips town. Skips the country. Skips out on friends and family. And looks for ways to get high. In the end of the story, he sings onto a ship in Jamaica as a way to keep going in the life and way he has grown accustomed to. At no time does Bone bother to do anything that would improve his capacity or prove that he is worthy of compassion from the reader; and yet, you will read the book, cover to cover, wondering what kinds of things the dude is going to do next to avoid reality and life (and get high).

I think, at the moment, I am done writing about this.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West

Real Heroes Fly

However, you can’t blame the individual nor can you blame the parent if a person is more interested in watching whatever is on or playing video games. That is almost entirely unacceptable in our society. To blame someone for actually doing something or not doing something is insane. I mean, we should blame the weapons manufacturers because people, outside of the influence of the manufacturing and distribution process, illegal buy or sell handguns and then use said handguns to go out and shoot people, possibly killing them. Whoever heard of actually taking accountability for ones actions? I know, I know, it’s a foreign ideal.

Let’s pretend for a moment that Television isn’t bad and that handguns, of themselves, don’t kill people. And, for a moment, let’s focus on television.

The TV in most peoples’ homes wasn’t purchased to be a decorative item. Yes, televisions can add to the décor of a home, but the item itself is used for information and for entertainment. I mean that. Televisions serve a purpose in transferring information or to entertain people. There is no other reason to have one if you don’t intend to be entertained or informed. News channels are entertainment venues unless something of great importance is happening, and then they become channels of information. We all watch and stare at the screen waiting for some kind of update. I remember having my televisions (all of them, there were three at the time) all turned into various news channels when 9/11 happened. All day, it seemed for weeks, if I was in the apartment, they remained on, they remained on the grisly and heart-wrenching pictures and videos of the planes crashing into the towers and the towers coming down. I really I can’t stand watching video of the towers coming down. But at the time, the news channels went from entertaining me with information about what was happening in the world to informing me about what was going on with something that had become personally important.

Do you remember that day, that week? We all appreciated the very distinctive manner in with President G.W. Bush handled the national emergency. Now, I believe, a majority of people would gladly oust the man for the way in which he manipulated public sentiment to get into Iraq. And we can’t just leave Iraq because we’ve created a powderkeg of a problem that we really need to see through… or until the independent governments ask us to leave. I’m good with the latter happening.

We also use television for entertainment. In the past I’ve written a couple of entries on what I am watching on TV these days. Right now, I get to find bit-torrent downloads of the shows I want to watch. Which means, I am currently keeping up with the Stargate shows and am thinking of seeing if I can get copies of Eureka; however, TV offers a lot of different options for people from educational entertainment channels like the Discovery network of channels (Discover, Travel, TLC, etc.) to purely entertainment driven channels like HBO and Showtime. You can turn on the TV at any time of the day or night and find yourself enmeshed in a world unlike anything you’ve ever experienced because television, at its core, is used to entertain people – most of the time. You can go on a sex romp through channels dedicated to pornography, or find yourself on a mid-twentieth century adventure through various classic movie channels. With the right equipment and money, you can do almost anything.

Imagine having this box in your house that was only ever used for transfer of information. You’d probably look for excuses not to have it or find other uses for it. An aquarium comes to mind. The nation has actually moved away from informational sources like newspapers preferring, instead, the sexier and easier accessibility of the internet. However, combine the information capabilities with entertainment, bring the movies into your home, add functionality that allows you to enjoy the experience, and the outcome is that people are going to schedule time to be at home to watch weekly serials (television shows), they’re going to go to news channels, they’re going to watch public and open access channels… the television becomes one element to entertainment.

I know that one roommate and I scheduled one night a week to watch Donald Trump (The Donald) fire one more person on his The Apprentice reality show. I like the show. I think it actually offers good advice for those who want to go into business. The key to the show is learning to work with people for a common objective. The kick in the pants with the show is that it is reality television and reality TV requires people who are only interested in their own objectives and goals. The outcome to this is you have a combination of people who know how to work well together and those who are more than likely going to stab you in the back the first chance you get. It’s entertaining, not informative. And yet, you can delve the depths of that kind of show and get useful information (though not from anything The Donald has written… that’s all useless crap).

Television, like so many other things, is bad if you make it bad. You can become obsessed. You can lose sight of what is important. The TV in your home can become this instrument that is so overwhelmingly in charge of your life that you will consider nothing else but what is on and when and how it affects your life. That is bad. That is the bad part of television watching. It is destructive and potentially dangerous and does lead to “couch potatoes” and overweight adults and children.

I remember my mother talking about soap operas once. She said that she was in a store and realized that one of her “soaps” was on and immediately left the cart she was shopping with, grabbed the child or children she had with her, and went home to watch that program. When she’d realized what she’d done, according to her, she stopped watching those shows altogether. It didn’t take some intervention, merely the realization that she was making her life revolve around the television.

Growing up we weren’t allowed to watch TV during certain parts of the day or, early on, on different days of the week. That meant that we, as children, had to find alternative sources of entertainment in order to fill the long (and often boring) hours between waking up and when we were allowed to watch whatever was on. When we were in school, and (theoretically) as long as our homework was done, we were allowed to watch cartoons in the afternoons and then whatever was on into the evening. In the summer it seemed like memory tells me that we weren’t allowed to watch television until after 5 p.m. That was the rule. We tried to break it. Frequently. But that was the rule.

As a result I learned to find other things to do. Sleep was one. But I’ve always required a bit of sleep. However, there are other things that we could do. Spending a lot of my formative years in Texas meant that I got used to the neighborhood, the creek that ran through the neighborhood, the woods and trees, as well as storm drains, and how to get to various locations. Having a bike was freedom because it meant I could go places and do things and I didn’t have to wait for my parents to get around to maybe being able to take me. It also meant that on cold mornings I got to ride that bike to school or walk. That was never fun, but the freedom of being able to do one thing required that I accept the obligation of doing something else.

Even driving a car, as a teenager, allowed me certain freedoms that were coupled with responsibilities. Most of them associated with shuttling brothers and sister to the various places they needed, or wanted, to be. As long as I did that I had the freedom to drive, to go places, to have a “ride” to work (so long as we had an extra car); and my parents had the freedom to do what they wanted to do with their lives.

TV allows us various freedoms. One of them is to be informed, if we want it, about what is happening in the world around us. We can learn from what is on. Another freedom is that we can be entertained. I’ve said this in the past, and I will probably say it again, but I am an entertainment junkie. Many people will read that, look at me, say something like, “I’ve lived with him… he, uhm…” and then trail off because I don’t always make it clear what is entertaining to me and what is not. I do look for new ways to entertain myself. However, TV is only one means of doing that. Movies are only one element. Exploring is another element. You can ride motorcycles, work on automobiles, go hiking, participate in community projects, there are all sorts of things that you can do that is entertaining and gets you out of the house and away from the television.

The thing that gets me is when people take the whole idea of TV to an extreme. Becoming fat and lazy because you’ve got to watch what is on and have to sit there all the time is an extreme. Not having a box in your home is an extreme. I can’t judge either extreme. I’ve known people who have monitors that are hooked up to DVD or VHS players simply so they can have educational shows on for their children fearing what is on broadcast television. Again, I don’t have what it takes to say anything about that. It’s a choice each individual, and family, has to make for themselves. I’m good with that. But to say that everyone who watches TV is a bad person or that all television is bad for you and holds no value is equally wrong. That is a choice you’ve made for yourself. Congratulations. I applaud your ability to make those kinds of choices.

From a religious context we have not been counciled to not have a television or not to watch television. General Conference, twice a year, is broadcast to millions of homes because there are television stations and people with those evil boxes in their homes. You get to hear God’s word from his prophets and apostles and other leaders because TV makes it possible. Instead of having to wait for a print copy of the addresses or an audio recording or a video recording you get to watch it live. When tragedies happen its broadcast right into your home. Think about that. Really think about it. For purely informational purposes the television is an invaluable tool. AND you don’t have to JUST watch information.

In my case I get to see shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Boston Legal and Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis and others. In the fall I get to experience Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip which I am excited about as well as many other shows that are currently in hiatus and will start up, again, sometime between September and May of next year. That is entertainment. Entertainment is putting aside my crappy life and taking up something that distracts me for a period of time. As long as it doesn’t get in the way of what I am trying to do (school, work, other things) then it is not a bad thing. It is merely one means of my filling my time with additional distractions. And I am good with that.

There will always be people who become too obsessed with something. And for those people I don’t know if there is a way to suggest or get help. Maybe they have to entirely remove the obsessive element from their lives. Little children don’t have the ability to determine, on their own, how much is too much. They need to be monitored. I am not an advocate of TV as babysitter, nor do I like the idea of the television being the only source of entertainment for children; nor the internet; nor video games. Children need to be pushed out the door and, if necessary, made to find alternative means of entertainment. Books are one source that I’ve enjoyed my entire life. Riding a bike is another one (which reminds me… anyone want to donate to the John Needs a Bike Fund?). Just because someone wants something doesn’t mean they need it or should have it. Just because you may want to watch TV doesn’t mean you should.

Stephen Covey in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People defined love through the action tense of the word. Not sex. But, more specifically, that love required acts in order for it to not only survive but to build and thrive. You have to do things for the people you claim you love. I’ve found that notion very interesting, since I read the book about ten, eleven… okay thirteen years ago. And as a result of my having identified with that notion of love I think it has helped define that attitude I have been looking for my adult life.

I am reminded of (and I apologize for using this again and again) what a girl once said to me, “You know you love me.” It was a statement and it directly led me to review what it was I felt, how I felt, what I would apply to her, and then our breaking up. We’ve stayed distant friends, acquaintances really, over the years… I keep thinking I need to see if she’s had a kid yet, but the outcome is still there. She thought, regardless of subsequent statements made, that we’d reached a point in our relationship where that should be true and I was there because I found her explosively hot.

One of the things that remains, in my mind, prevalent when dealing a member of the opposite sex, who is not related to you, is whether or not you are a) going to like her, and b) whether or not you are going to like her family. You see, I am not under the misapprehension that dating and eventually marriage is merely about two people. No. Not at all. In fact, it is about two families. Can I tolerate hers? Can she tolerate mine? Many relationships have started and moved forward without both parties ever finding out if that is true. You don’t marry an individual, you marry a family.

The outcome of love, if you are extending this through a dating perspective, is marriage and children. Whether or not you agree with me on that is inconsequential, to me, because the outcome of real love is marriage and children. Marriage is between a man and a woman. Children should be a product of that marriage and that love – where possible. Before you can get to the point, and notion, of marriage you have to go through love.

Love, then, has a different background than friendship. There may not be a time commitment associated with it. Oh, don’t take that the wrong way, there is a time commitment associated with love, but it’s not like having and building friendships. You can’t sit and say, “How long have I known this person? Three years! Check. Have we hung out pretty regularly? Once a week for two and a half! Check. Is this someone I would call when something positive has happened in my life or if I am living on the other side of the world simply to chat? Done it, still do it. Check.” There are different criteria for love than for those people you think of as friends and no matter what anyone says or will say the distinctions are different.

One element to true love is time. You have to have put in time to get to the end result. There is no substitute for it. It’s like building a friendship where the rules are different. I honestly believe people when they say things like, “I fall in love at least once a week.” Granted, in the back of my mind the word “love” is transposed with “lust” but to the individual, they have found an emotion that is defined, by them, through love and they can find it at least once a week.

When dealing with family the reason love exists to fully between siblings, even battling siblings, is because you have the natural element of time and location. This builds into another element that defines love: Location. You can’t live on opposite sides of the country or opposite sides of the world and declare love for each other. Yes, it happens. But it doesn’t happen in such a way that you are talking about a true respect and opinion for and of someone else. Finding things like respect and developing a positive opinion of someone else only comes from being able to be around that person and having spent time with him/her. You can’t do that long distance. That is probably one of the biggest reasons that long distance relationships don’t work. You’ve not been bothered to actually get to know the person you are trying to woo.

Respect is something that you can’t fake. Either you have it or you don’t. There are people who will always have it for everyone they come in contact with. There are those who will never have it for the people they come in contact with. You’re better with the former than the latter. The latter is a bad relationship to be in. In a fledgling relationship the idea of respect can go a long way to actually fostering it between the individuals involved because it is a strong emotion that will lead to something far stronger in the long run. It is the desire to respect and the desire to love that builds a romance – what keeps that romance alive is actual love and actual respect that builds as the months and years go by.

You can fall in love with anyone. You can fall into the emotional trap that is passive love. Passive love is doing nothing and expecting nothing in return. It may move to the physical act of love, sex, but passive love doesn’t grow, it doesn’t mature, it doesn’t allow for real growth of an individual, it merely exists. It exists in a way that makes at least one of the individuals feel dirty. Some people take this “dirty” feeling to a whole new level and call it nice and natural. It is nice to feel bad about yourself and as a result there are people out there who will help you do it just so you can get your jollies on through feeling poorly about yourself.

True love, the kind of love that fairytales never talk about; the kind of love that movies confuse; true love isn’t something that happens overnight. It doesn’t happen at “first sight,” it doesn’t happen because you want it to. Love is an emotion that can be defined through example, but to really understand it you have to have experienced it.

The Greeks had four different words for love. Agape, Eros, Philia, and Storge. Agape is general affection or concern; Eros is passionate love (root word for erotic); Philia is virtuous love, friendship, and loyalty; and Storge is natural affection – as that between parent and child.

I am not the only one who has separated and defined out love or friendship or even relationships. There will always be differences between one kind of a relationship (e.g. friendship) and another (e.g. spouse). The separation is important when determining whether or not a form of “love” is actually playing a role in the greater experience.

Even religion separates loves. You’ve got Charity and pretty much every other kind of love bulked together. Charity, defined, is godlike love, it is love totally unfettered by anything else. You throw all of the loves together, remove any negative connotations, add a sprinkling of Godlike qualities, and you have charity. All other loves, friendship, marital, natural, passive, lust, fall into the other category. The Christian ethos is to achieve a form of Charity which also denotes a form of humility.

True love isn’t something that you find because you’ve dated someone for three weeks or three years. It is something that is developed over a long period of time. I’ve told people that one test of a relationship is how they handle the first argument and how the relationship survives. I, personally, don’t see the need to raise my voice to many people and in arguments with girls I am dating I don’t raise my voice. On top of that experience dictates that when you can see something is wrong you need to fix it. For me, the relationship is about one other person and that is the girl I am with.

I’ve said it before, and I will probably say it again and again, I don’t have the capacity to date or, really, like more than one person at a time. If I am going out with someone it doesn’t matter if she is dating other people, that we’re not exclusive, because I am only going out with her. In a disagreement (and trust me, I naturally cause a lot of those) the only thing that matters, to me, is to resolve it. Where we’re going, what we’re doing, what is going on around us takes a backseat to the relationship.

I guess, what I am wondering is whether or not I have experienced love outside of the realm of family. Familial love is different from the Eros of the Greeks. You don’t look at your siblings and say, “Mmmm. Nice!” That would be gross and in most places illegal. At the same time, you do look at people you are dating and you do say that in the hopes that the passion will come. As an LDS man (I wanted to add young and even though I look younger than I am, I don’t feel I can add that anymore) part of getting to the passionate love is working toward marriage. Sometimes I wonder if it’s not a grand conspiracy to get people to expedite people to the altar by theoretically limiting what can be done through hormonal urges before marriage. You should ignore that thought.

The point, though, is that love is not a product of first sight or a direct product of infatuous feelings that build over the course of a relationship. Nor is it a guarantee to a happy life or a happy marriage. I believe that many people that claim the right to having felt or been in love are confusing their emotions. Instead of having been in love they were in lust. Instead of having experiences love they are describing the experience and feelings left over from chemically induced euphoria. Love is a product, as Covey stated, of work. In the end, to feel real love, to feel that real passion every day about the same person, requires a long commitment, it requires a lot of time, it requires a lot of energy, and – most importantly – it requires giving of oneself over and over again, to achieve the desired objective.

Love is not a definable characteristic until you’ve lived within its throws for a long, long time. And then, all you can say is, “Talk to me after twenty years of marriage.”

They say that we are living in the greatest period in the history of the world.

They say that Mt. Saint Helens is growing again. Four feet a day. Pretty soon, once the eruptions stop that form the mountain, the peak will be where it was before it erupted more than 20 years ago.

They say that if you get an education you will be better off financially than if you don’t get an education. The key to being better off, though, is deciding that when the day is done it is time to move to a location where what you got a degree is in need of your services. Staying in the same place you went to school, unless it is a major world city, is stupid.

They say that all of the land masses on the planet were once a large body called Pangaea. They say it took millions of years for North and South American and Australia to push away from the Europe and Africa and Asia and that Antartica was once a garden paradise.

If your religious they say that Adam and Eve were the first man and woman.

They also say that man is descended from apes. Yet, there is no substantive evidence that connects man to apes. In the whole course of recorded human history there have been no significant genetic anomalies, no changes in appearance, nothing that would suggest that in thousands of years man is not evolving into another iteration.

They say that they’ve found elements of the missing link. They also say that they’ve found a race of hobbit like creatures living in some remote part of the world. They also say that those hobbit like creatures was really one creature and it was one man who suffered from a disease that is around today and was merely just short. No hobbits.

They say that movies and television and music are good for the soul.

They say that movies and television and music are bad for the soul.

They say that the sun shines. It rises in the east and sets in the west. They say that the light from the sun, not the visible light from the sun, causes cancer. They say that tomatoes cause cancer. They say that tobacco causes cancer. They say that eggs cause cancer. They say that marijuana does not have a direct connection to cancer – which was kind of surprising since the inhalation of smoke into the lungs breaks down the lining of the esophogal passages and the bronchial chambers which allows for a mutation in one cell which spreads to another cell which, in turn, eventually kills you because the cancer has then spread far enough that radiation won’t kill it.

They say that radiation will kill you.

They say that radiation can cure you, but that the cure is almost as bad as the disease. It’s kind of funny that cancer is considered a disease when, in truth, it is probably closer to the mutation that changed apes into mans.

They say that if we look hard enough that we will find the missing link between man and apes.

They say that the world was created in seven days. They also say that seven days means seven creative periods. They say that God’s time is not man’s time. They say that we are children of God. Children of Adam and Eve. Children of Noah and his crew, brood, clan, the remaining survivors when God determined the Earth was full of wickedness and decided to cause a flood.

They say the flood was a baptism.

They say that the flood was probably a regionalized event because people, at that time, lived in a very small area and that it was possible for God to send down rain for forty days and nights and kill everyone, sans eight people, because there was nowhere to go.

They say that entire herds of mastodons died simply because they became mired in the mud. Hard to become mired in mud when the instinct of many herds, regardless of where the herd is located or what kind of animals, is the protection of the herd. One mastodon gets stuck you might as well assume that the rest turn and leave. It’s the law of the wild.

They say that Adam lived in what is currently Missouri. They say it if you’re LDS or affiliate with that religion. They say that Noah floated in his ark for almost a year. They say that the ark looked like a modern ship. They also say that the ark was probably a large rectangular box. They say that he had two of every kind of animal, unless the animal was used as cattle and then he had seven. They say that he spent time after the flood in the ark. They say that the ark is now located on Mt. Ararat.

They say that it takes millions of years to build a mountain, let alone a mountain range.

They say that the last time there was major movement in the Wasatch range the mountains leaped in the air about 17 feet – plus or minus 3. They say that Utah is about 400 to 500 years overdue for another earthquake.

They say that Yellowstone National Park is sitting on top of one of the largest volcanoes in the world. They say that when it blows it will take most of the western United States with it.

They say that thirty minutes of sun in the morning is good for you. Conversely, they say that thirty minutes of sun in the evening ain’t so good for you.

They say that they’ve traced back all of human lineage back to a single woman in Africa. They say that they have what they believe to be an artist’s rendition of what she would’ve looked like. She doesn’t look all that good. Kind of ugly. Rather disgusting, not what I would’ve imagined my ancient ancestor to be. They say that’s where we all come from. That’s our Eve. Maybe it’s Noah’s wife… what’s her name? It doesn’t matter. They say it’s what we should be learning.

They say that evolution is the answer to so many things.

They say that war does little to curb the growth in humanity. They say that the 8.5 million Jews, the 20+ million Russians, and the lives lost with all of the fighting forces around the world didn’t even put a dent on the overall population of the world.

They say that the black plague destroyed a large percentage of the population. Disease kills more than people kill.

They say that we start wars when the population of young men exceeds a certain percentage. They say that the old send the young to war. They say that women run the world better than men. They say that peace is possible. They say that all religions ultimately want peace. They forget to say that some religions only want peace when all other religions are dead or converted. Forget that we have a right to decide.

They say that the world is not enough.

They say that we’re going to the moon.

They say that we are going to mars.

They say that 20 billions dollars is a reasonable cost for almost anything: space exploration, reclamation of river delta that people insist upon living in even though it lies beneath sea level and anything made by man is made to fail. They say that it is the federal government’s responsibility to come in and fix what was damaged or destroyed. They say that the President failed, congress failed, the system failed even though every hurricane has brought damage and destruction it is suddenly the nations problem when one small area, which should be uninhabitable, is proved to be uninhabitable.

They say party likes it’s 1999. I was there in 1999. Nothing happened. The lights stayed on. My computer booted up the next day. My credit cards still worked. There was no looting, no riots, no nothing to stop the peace and tranquility of the world at large.

They say that the Y2K problem had to do with the difference between 99 and 1999, 00 and 2000. They say that no one thought about it when computers were in their infancy, in the 80’s. In our homes.

They say a lot of things: the sky is blue; grass is green; roses are red; can’t you sing.

They say that poetry is one of the earliest forms of writing in any language. They say that I should like poetry.

They say a lot of things… and today, I say there will be more as more comes.

As I am trying, hard, not to swear I find that I am not adding colorful metaphors into the frustration that is young adults getting married. But really, come on girl, get it over with already. I can see why engaged couples, in this church, are encouraged to have long courtships and short engagements. The long courtship is to verify whether or not you actually like each other; the short courtship is to spare friends and family the pain of dealing with wedding preparations and uncertainty.

Truth told, I just want to rant about all sorts of things. Today, though, we’re going to stick to the topic of that girl and marriage.

The other day, she was talking to another girl and they were speaking, at some length, on the way some of the boys in their lives choose to dress. I believe the word they used was like, “dorks.” In order to counteract this method of dress they were suggesting to each other ways they could get their significant others to dress in a way that was more appropriate in their opinions. Most of the suggestions consisted of them making purchases for the guy and, over time, getting rid of anything they didn’t particularly like.

There was no suggestion of a conversation about dress and grooming, merely the subtle change in attire over a period of time. All done to undermine what the guy likes to wear in lieu of what the girl has decided is more appropriate for station, upbringing, desired class, or simply out of some perceived notion of style.

Granted, I think that a lot of women have more sense of style than most guys. There are exceptions to that rule, but for the most part, if I were to have to judge a girls sense of style or a guys, I would probably go with the girls.

But that’s not really the issue, at hand, here. Guys sense of style or girls. I think the issue at hand is the level and lack of communication between people. Here, right now, this very moment it’s a matter of a girl and a guy getting married and the girl is already planning ways to undermine the relationship.

Think about that for a moment. The girl is already planning ways to undermine their relationship. She is planning how to manipulate her fiancé and spouse. And sure, sure, it’s a simple, small little matter that probably doesn’t mean a hill of guacamole in the long run, but it is one element to a relationship.

I think I could’ve, possibly, ignored that had there not been other aspects to their relationship that have come to light in the months that I’ve known both the future bride and groom. I work with one, I had a class with the other. They seem to like me. I don’t know what my feelings toward them are.

Still, anytime the girl wants to make a decisions she will say something like, “We have decided….” And then I wonder, ‘Did “we” really decide or did “you” decide and apply “we” to the decision?”

It doesn’t really matter. I’ve only really dealt with these two passively and I can tell you it is we transposed over me. Simply done. The girl wears the pants in the relationship and then acts as though the guy actually wears the trousers. She said, “We decided that it was okay for me to eat chocolate whenever I wanted to.” Which, in my less-than-humble opinion, is a really stupid thing to have to make a “we” decision about. But the statement was made and I kept quiet. Someone else asked, “Did you both make the decision or did just you make the decision.”

The girl answered, “Well, I asked my fiancé what he thought.” Therefore, a “we” decisions was made in a matter that really didn’t.

I believe, from observation, that a lot of her “we” decisions is that way. She decides and maybe asks his opinion and then applies a tag to what is going on that is neither “me” nor “I” thereby sharing the decision whether it was or not.

I’m pretty certain there’s some kind of a lesson or story or something in this, but the truth of the matter is that when they, two coworkers, got talking about how to manipulate their guys into wearing what they thought the guys should be wearing I just about swore, turned off my computers, packed up my things, and left the building. Yes, that is correct, Elvis left the building. And, at the same time, I was accosted by the ideas and notions and contradictions in what was being said.

These girls want guys to dress in a manner that does not suggest “dork” to the outside world. Great. Congrats. Good luck with that. Get the guys to dress so that the world doesn’t look at them for what they are, or at least appear to be.

But here’s the problem. You meet. You date. You fall in love. And then you change.

I’ve read one or two books about relationships. Not that any of it has sunk in enough that its applicable to my own life, but I’ve read a few books. Almost across the board they state a common malady in relationships. Girls get married to change the guy. “He will change for me,” or, “I can change him.” And also, almost across the board, the books all state that you cannot change your spouse, you cannot change the bad boy, you cannot cause a leopard to change its spots.

Guys are going to be guys. Dorks are going to be dorks. Style is going to come in and go out. And you have to fall in love with the person, not what they wear.

I think this adage, I may have just made it up, “Love them for who they are and they will change to please you,” is probably very applicable. You know, the dork in the relationship (truth told I think they’re both dorks and they both have problems with dress and style) is truthful in that he is accepting the future bride for who she is. She, however, chooses not to accept him for who he is. I wonder if she even realizes this about herself. She doesn’t really like him even though she is marrying him.

“I will mold him in my image,” she says to herself and then plots ways to undermine who the dork is. Who he is.

So, this was rather frustrating to me. For me. I really did get up and leave abruptly because I found the comments stupid, naive, and ultimately, they suggested undercurrents that undermine the long term relationship. The thought that caused me to get up and walk out was, simply, “Some people have to learn principles on their own.”

I am not suggesting that I am some guru or savant who has all the answers. Quite the contrary – if I understood relationships and girls and dating and the process toward marriage I think I would’ve taken that leap and gotten married, had a dozen kids, found a career to support my family, and lived married-ever-after. Yup. That’s the key. Kids. Marriage. Career.

What really gets me is that we, as a church, send our 19 to 21 year old young men and, generally, 21 to 23 year old young women on missions. Some people claim this is to teach them about compassion. And that is probably true. Others claim it is to help them to grow, emotionally, over that two year period. And that may be true as well (though current observations of RM’s would denote something entirely different). But, I believe that we send these young men and women out into the mission field so that they can learn to relate with and interact with someone else on a level that is not completely superficial. You have to learn to interact with people differently when on a mission with planning, teaching, living together… on occasion shopping together, tracting, working through issues, finding solutions, etc. etc. etc. You have to learn to communicate in a way that you don’t learn in the military, at war, or working through a career… and the outcome is that you become emotionally deeper, better able to handle situations and circumstances that leap out at you, and, in the end you prepare yourself for marriage and further training on leadership in the church and community.

You serve a mission to learn to communicate. That’s probably the principle reason you go two-by-two instead of three-by-three or one-by-one. You go in pairs so that you can learn the intimate art of communicating with someone else.

It doesn’t count, communicating, if you can read the other person and they have no clue as to what you are thinking or are going to do or what you feel or if you’re angry or not. You have to talk. You have to communicate. You have to open up and share. You have to do exactly what is required in a dating and marriage relationship to succeed or you will fail.

So, I am writing this and the thought hits that I was dating this girl (she’s now married as is true of the vast majority of girls I’ve dated in the past) and we get into a little tiff as I am driving us somewhere. Her immediate reaction was to stop talking, physically move to the other side of the car, and get mad. Now, at the time I really liked this girl, a part of me still does; so, my immediate reaction was to pull my vehicle over to the side of the road, kill the engine, and find out what had just happened. Hot to cold in less than a second is never a good sign and when you want a relationship to continue you work through the cold moments. The faster the better. Festering problems are never good and my reaction was that she was more important to me than wherever we were going.

You can tell this, in part, because I remember her and this event and I can’t, for the life of me, tell you where we were going or what we did.

We talked. She told me what she thought I’d done. I immediately apologized, made amends, and then promised that I would change so that it did not happen again. I could’ve mouthed off or said something that made her uncomfortable, it doesn’t really matter. Not to me. The point was that I found it important to fix the problem, to talk about it, to make things right, and her reaction, even after I pulled over, was to ignore the problem, not talk about it, to let it go right now in lieu of plans that meant nothing to me outside of the relationship and in the end I think our relationship grew because, in my mind, the person is always more important than the event or the plans.

You have to stop, talk, and get through the awkwardness of early communication in a relationship before you can have trust and before you can really build a strong relationship.

So, back to where I started. The mistake this coworker, girl, is making, and probably many other girls, is that she assumes that any changes she wants to make will be okay with him because love trumps everything else. Not true. She loses by trying to change him rather than just love him for who and what he is. He is a man who has been raised to dress the way he does without regard to girl. The girl has a responsibility to talk to him and tell him what she doesn’t like and to find out if there is a way to help with dress differently so that her opinion of the way he dresses can mesh with the way he wants to dress.

But some people have to learn things the hard way. They have to make all of these mistakes and hope that the ambiguous emotion of love really does come into play and that they will be able to work through the problem rather than build and build and build a much larger problem because you didn’t figure out how to talk to your significant other early on about stupid small things like clothes or food or what side of the bed you want to sleep on. (Personally, I like dead center.)

Learn to talk, to communicate, and quit trying to manipulate things to your being. If you love him, and he trusts you, he will eventually change because he wants to and not because you’ve forced him to. He will ask for you help, you will talk to him about things, and in the end, you will both be happy.

But what do I know?

Very little, to tell the truth. Very little.

With some of my feelings out in the open, it is important to state that Oscar’s are movie professionals voting for movies they think have some merit. These are people rewarding their own. It’s not like the public gets a say in what is deemed Best Picture or Best Male Actor or any other category. And yet, we as a viewing, consumer public are made to believe that the Best designation is true.

The Oscars are tantamount to buying off a baseball game. The studio with the most money and the most influence in a given year is going to win. Upsets are rare and very few. Oscar sweethearts can maintain that status so long as the paychecks and gifts keep flowing.

With that said, I just read about Annie Proulx’s comments in The Guardian newspaper, a British rag, where she claimed that the adaptation for her short story, Brokeback Mountain was robbed of a Best Picture Oscar.

Now, I hold no real love for a homosexual lifestyle and in truth find the thoughts of one rather repugnant. However, people have a right to choose and if they choose that path it doesn’t mean I have to hate the individual, just the lifestyle and choice.

So, Brokeback Mountain was an underdog that a lot of people thought deserved more than the three Oscars it was awarded. Great. It might have. However, that doesn’t mean that it was going to win.

People, in this country and around the world, assume that just because we have shows like Will and Grace on TV and we spend so much time talking about a particular alternative lifestyle that there are a lot more people who live this lifestyle than there really are. We think, because politicians pander to special interest groups that these groups have larger followings than they really do. In a political arena, sure, that’s probably true; but in the real world, the world that matters, constituencies and consumers, the truth is more pervasive than one in which a sexual minority has clout.

Will and Grace is a funny show. Just ask my roommate. Ask me. I’ve watched enough episodes to be able to tell you that it is funny for what it is and not what it is preaching. However, it took moving in with a fan of the show for me to watch even one episode. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be interested.

That still doesn’t really answer Ms. Proulx’s comments, though, about her film not getting a Best Picture Academy Award.

Ms. Proulx, like you will ever read this, you need to realize that if current estimates are correct, the gay and lesbian population in the United States is such a minority that it is almost non-existent. The people of the United States, as indicated by a radical president and his followers and support, are not willing, yet, to consistently support the theme and lifestyle of your work. Regardless of the artistic merits of your short story or the film based on the short story, the Academy and the public at large do not agree with you or your sentiments.

Your sentiments are rather self-centered and show a lack of understanding and awareness of the very culture you wish the Academy would be in tune with. Granted, Hollywood is out of touch with its consumers, but that does not mean that they are out of touch with what will and does sell to the conscience of this country. You, ma’am, are very out of touch.

Granted, your movie has touched lives. Several people who have watched it have expressed their appreciation for something that has spoken directly to their experience. It might even speak directly to your own experiences, but, again, it does not mean that the majority of people who make movies or watch movies, the vast majority in excess of 90% of the population, can relate to your writing or a movie based on it.

You, yourself, have won awards for excellence in your chosen field. Congratulations. However, expecting the Academy to award you where the publishing world is willing to acknowledge your excellence is like asking a child to pick the prettiest picture. Hand them a lot of colors and see what happens. Chances are, you will be disappointed again.

The Academy is not an organization that can be predicted and just because the Spirit Awards chose to name your movie Best Picture does not mean that this reflects the viewing public as a whole.

There are so few movies that are good to choose from these days, that artistically merit an award, that something which speaks directly to the voting body (people who actually make movies) is more likely to choose the element that speaks to them. Crash (not Trash) does that.

Ma’am, it is not often when someone can sit down and say that another person’s opinion is wrong; especially in this day and age, but your opinion is wrong because your opinion is based off of an emotional argument and not off of the facts as they stand.

Your work may inspire thousands and tens of thousands and may go a long way to help make alternative lifestyles more accepted in this country, but to expect what you demand now is naïve and stupid. More, you decided to voice your opinion where it doesn’t even matter to this voting public and where your message might receive more attention.

Congratulations. You’ve won Best Naïve Rant in my book.

Real Heroes Fly ]]> http://www.johnhattaway.com/2006/03/naive-rants/feed/ 0 http://www.johnhattaway.com/2006/02/feel-good-answers/ http://www.johnhattaway.com/2006/02/feel-good-answers/#comments Tue, 07 Feb 2006 03:19:48 +0000 smokingpen http://www.johnhattaway.com/?p=251 Today has proven to be a very interesting day. Not that anything in particular has happened. More that I have had a series of events where the sum total has come out to be different, interesting.

My roommate told me, about a week ago, about this girl who is a BYU student who is volunteering, at his work. Last week he said she was dressed in an outfit with her initials emblazoned on then; this week she was wearing clothing that expressed not only her hair color, but also her sexuality. I found the sight of her very interesting. She is a very attractive girl with a lot, in the looks department, going for her. However, speaking to her was entirely different.

Normally, when I stand next to someone, talk to them, I get a sense of who the person is and what they are trying to get out of life. I know, I know, that seems a little far fetched, but I get some sense of the person and maybe not what makes them special, but definitely that there is someone standing there. I didn’t get that from this girl. The roommate tried to explain this to me last week and then suggested I come down to his school to experience her for myself.

As I stood there chatting with her she stood there with very good posture and was very nice to look at. Granted, were girls less than the sum total of all their parts, I think I could find myself interested in just looking at this girl; but I am not interested in just looking at someone, I want to talk to them, share ideas, or have ideas shared with me, and in the end, feel as though I can and am relating to someone on the other side of the conversation. That wasn’t the case today.

Instead, I felt as though I was standing there listening to someone recite well-rehearsed words that were meant to impress just the right person in just the right way. Imagine watching a Ms. America pageant and listening to the contestant recite, over and over again, the platitudes that are meant to impress judges and elicit support.

“World peace.”

I mean, come on, watch Ms. Congeniality and listen to the things the contestants say to each other and the coaching that Sandra Bullocks character is given and then you might understand what is happening. The real difference isn’t in the vacuous platitudes, but that the movie, Ms. Congeniality, makes the contestants appear to have more going for them than merely the pageant and winning.

There are many different documentaries that outline the world of beauty pageants. They show how shallow these girls, and women, can be; and moreover, there are comedies that make fun of the entire lifestyle. Beauty pageants have a tendency, and look, that makes one believe that beauty pageants hit their modernist age sometime in the 80’s with the big hair, excessive make-up, and tacky smiles and never really figuring out that there is more to beauty and fashion than the 80’s era in modern American history.

It is a little disturbing, then, to stand there talking to a girl who is wearing way too much make-up, is dressed as though she is trying to impress a panel of judges, and, in turn, has nothing of any concrete value to say (and all of it rehearsed), the sum total not equalling all of her parts; but rather, equally far less than you would expect from someone who’d served an LDS church mission, worked on temple square, and been accepted into BYU (from personal experience this is not necessarily an easy thing).

What really disturbed me is that I can sense stupidity and she didn’t even have that going for her. For her it is pop music with a Christian bent and influences ranging throughout the “pop-tarts” of the modern pop-music genre, and no real direction except to say that her music might help her achieve something where beauty school or becoming a dental hygienist is the normal way of life.

Don’t get me wrong, she is a lovely girl that is just not for me. I want to be able to sit down with someone and talk to them, discuss things, you know, someone with a head on her shoulders, plans for the future, and who, as a choice and not out of consequence, wants to be a mother. In this case, and many others, I feel that it is consequence rather than choice that would put little miss sunshine in the station of “mother” and leave a career, education, or some form of advancement to someone else. These “consequences” lead to bad parenting.

Call me shallow, but I want someone who wants something out of life.

It took ten years to get into BYU or a church sponsored school. It took ten years for me to come to terms with parts of my mission and my life. It took ten years before I’ve really started to feel as though I could settle down somewhere (though Utah is not that somewhere).

Ten years is a long time to wait for things to happen; and yet, wait I have because there has been little or no choice.

Part of the reason I was up so much during the night was because of a phone call I received yesterday afternoon. It was the owner of the debt I’ve been trying to eradicate. Three or four years ago the company sent me letters that would’ve allowed me to exonerate the debt at a rate of 20% of what I owed. To date I have paid between 79 and 81% of the total. Still, as I sat and went through the short conversation with the individual on the other end of the line I received the impression that he didn’t care one whit about whether or not I could afford to make the level of payments I have, historically, been making in the past. .

Note: the percentages and numbers I am sharing don’t include additional payments I’ve made at various times during the three years I’ve been paying this down. The overall debt reduction can be as high as 85% of total single debt load.

At about three in the morning I discovered that, because of finances, I couldn’t sleep. Not because I was worried about where money would come from, but as a result of the idea that this new individual would stoop to the kinds of tactics that he went through to get me to pay a set rate. I guarantee you that there were a couple of factors involved in the conversation. One, he had a quota to meet to get a bonus; and two, he didn’t want to take the time to put numbers into his computer to see what would be “allowable” based on whatever equations and numbers they use to make a decision on the lowered amount that I will pay.

The result was about four hours, this morning, of research into secondary creditors, debt relief, charge backs as opposed to charge offs, and what the law allows me to do in relation to the company and their tactics. This gentleman walked a fine line, in my estimation, on breaking the law in order to get me to pay a certain amount; however, he didn’t cross the line and break any laws or rules. Still, there are a lot of laws out there that protect the consumer from aggressive debt collectors. Apparently the industry grew from 1.1 million about ten years ago to a multi-billion dollar a year industry. With many companies using rather shady tactics to get people to pay money so they can make a massive profit off of a small investment.

The entrepreneur in me thinks, “Why don’t I start a company like this?” and then I realize that it goes against my better judgment, my ethos, my feelings of personal worth… you name it, the very notion of the industry is something that sickens me – regardless of the amount of overall profit that it can generate.

Still, the company that owns my debt is a pretty good company. It was started by two brothers who leveraged themselves through credit cards about 11 years ago to start their company. And then, they started it in a basement. Pretty gutsy. But a move that paid off more than a thousand-fold as they are one of the top companies for debt recovery in the nation.

Still, that wasn’t enough. Knowing whom I am speaking to (company-wise) is good but it’s just not enough. There was a notion that I didn’t quite understand “charge backs” as opposed to “charge offs” and somehow the difference was important. My initial search was on charge backs which, it turns out, is the industry term for what the consumer does when disputing a charge on the credit card. Basically, the business loses the charge amount and the consumer credit card is credited with said amount. There are now entire industry and credit reporting bureaus that surround charge backs to help protect the business.

Which then led me to an area of the federal code on Credit Collections Protection. Charge Off’s are on the company side where money was lent and not paid back. A charge off is a tactic used by the company to record realized loses in capital, get a tax write-off in the year of the charge off, and then sell the debt for pennies on the dollar. In essence a debt load of 10,000 can be had for close to 1000. Debts are not sold individually, they are sold collectively.

Most of these companies operate on a principle of recovery. In a sense, they have a break-even point where money collected is profit and they are willing and capable of writing off remaining balances because they’ve collected earnings. In my case, they have been collecting earnings over debt for about two to two and half years based on industry norms and standards. Pretty amazing. Like I said, if I had no scruples this would be the industry to get into

What caught my attention somewhere between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m. is that I have now paid twice the amount of money I originally borrowed. Quite possibly more as I didn’t really bother to keep concise records back in the heyday. It’s quite sickening to think this debt load has been hanging over my head for this long. If I knew then what I know now I wouldn’t have allowed myself to get caught in this trap.

However, when a charge off occurs, credit reporting agencies are required to keep a record of it for seven years. This is the only reporting that can take place on the debt. Original creditor and no other. Therefore, regardless of my intentions when it comes to the money, the charge off remains on my record until sometime in 2008. According to Transunion the discharge date will be around 10/2008. The other sites did not offer when the discharge from my credit report will take place; however, since the date is based on the last payment made to the original creditor, I would imagine that the discharge will be the same, or thereabouts, for all three reporting agencies.

Regardless, the law allows someone like me to stop answering the phone and, if necessary, to send a letter of intent for the company to stop contacting me – and they have to stop. Basically, the contact allowed to a secondary debt company is very limited and, as such, they have very little recourse. This does not mean that they can’t take their recourses. For example, they can sue. However, the cost of a law-suit would exceed the recovery cost and, according to the myriad websites I ended up reading (and some articles and the actual laws) the chance of a lawsuit diminishes based on location of collecting agency, individual (suits have to be filed in state where the debtor resides) and the outcome is a settlement for significantly less or the selling off of debt to another company.

Moreover, these companies are only allowed to contact persons of interest (e.g. family members) once to try and ascertain a phone number or address to forward correspondence in couping debt. In short, a changed cell phone number, an unlisted address or a change of location, and it becomes very easy to disappear. However, the drawback is that if the debt is sold, and sold again, new companies can make that one phone call and attempt to be paid on the debt.

Debt never goes away. That is one of the tenets of recovery companies. However, there are protections under the law that allows the consumer, the debtor, to stop harassment and to maintain standard of living while attempting to recover their lives and credit score. A charge off will affect your ability to get a credit card (I have my first one with a very small balance in a lot of years) but, when all is said and done, there comes a statute of limitations where no agency can force you to pay back the money. Sure, the dollar amounts exist on ledgers somewhere, but they are unenforceable based off of state laws and legislative action.

Not that people want to get away from their debt, but sometimes, I think, you have to forget yourself and walk away from those who would affect standard of living. In my case, and I am not saying I am doing this yet, I have aggressively paid the debt and done a Herculean job, I think, of getting rid of it. However, in current circumstances, I believe it is reasonable to request that someone I am not even legally obligated to deal with work with me on payments so that I am not forced to stop what I am doing in order to pay bills where I would have more money to pay them, maintain standard of living (estimates based off of current research into college graduates), and find myself in a marketable position; it doesn’t make sense to allow someone, or even an entity, to dictate how I live my life.

Granted, a lot of what I am doing is knee-jerk. I am upset. I believe that the way the payment’s have been handled over the past several months has been rather poor and the person they have working the phones is not the best person for the job or to deal with the public (or me), but the outcome is, and will be, the same. The debt will go away one way or another. Either I come up with a way to come to a settlement or I will have it paid off. In either case, the debt is going away very soon.

With that said, I went to Google and googled “haiku”. What I discovered I already knew, in that a haiku is a highly structured form of Japanese poetry. The first two links, though, appeared to respond like they were dead, and the third was a wikipedia (or wiki) entry at wikipedia.org. (Note: wiki is generally referring to a accumulation and distribution, often to a specific group, of information in the form of encyclopedic knowledge.)

Wikipedia.org then proceeded to offer a history of the haiku (you can review that here) which is interesting but not that interesting, to me.

Anyway, with the basic knowledge down, a haiku is not just a highly structured form of Japanese poetry it also follows a very specific pattern. Three lines of 5-7-5. If that doesn’t make sense, count the syllables. Not all haiku follows the 5-7-5 rules and there are variations. Regardless, the poetry is still very structured and, from what I’ve read, more metaphorical in sense than literal in meaning.

For example:

Frog leaps onto land
As lily pad floats on water
Tadpole swims away

A quick haiku. Is there meaning? Is it even a good haiku or even something worth writing about or mentioning? Don’t ask me. I am jaded and have already stated I don’t enjoy the process of writing poetry. You have to think too much: number of syllables, words, rhyming (where applicable), yadda, yadda, yadda.

So, I wrote some haiku’s and kept none of them. I’ve got a file, in “My Documents” on the computer that holds only poetry. Every once in a while I can’t seem to focus and then out comes the poetry. A few years ago I was dating a girl and shared some with her. One of her brothers decided he wanted to read some (without asking) and picked up the packet of poetry. There are poems that weren’t meant, even, for the girlfriend to see. And yet, there he was reading things I don’t believe he had a right to be reading.

Someday I wonder if I won’t be more famous for writing poetry than for writing fiction. One is a lot easier, in my head, than the other. In my lit 250 class today the teacher lamented the fact that people don’t write like John Keats. He sat down and in the matter of a couple of hours wrote one of the worlds most famous poems, Ode to a Nightingale.

Sure, you know what, I’m not likely to share my poetry and I wouldn’t compare what I’ve written to what John Keats has written, or anyone else (I don’t much like poetry). However, the act of writing poetry, in my opinion, is not as hard as people make it out to be. At the same time, I don’t think a lot of people who admire poetry have the ability to write poetry.

It seems, to me, that people who write and share poetry are a little messed up; but hey, I occasionally qualify.