great expectations.

image via Friends of Type- basically a dream blog for typography lovers. Follow them on Twitter.




...expect everything.

disclaimer: for once, church of the granny bike is going to be a little churchy.

True fact: whenever I get homesick, I listen to grunge music.  I get homesick when it rains because I think, hey, if I really wanted to live somewhere where it rained so much, I could just go home.  It's been raining a lot lately.  So I rediscovered Nirvana's Unplugged album. 


Did you catch that logic? Are you with me?  


Anyways, this time around The Vaseline's cover "Jesus Doesn't Want Me for a Sunbeam"  caught my ear.  My latent inner Mormon has some theories as to why.  Thinking of Stella's post over at The Exponent,  and maybe even actually thinking about Jesus for a second,  the song is a good answer to the question of "How can we view and follow Jesus in a way that will actually bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on earth?"  Maybe Jesus wants us to be more than Sunbeams- maybe he knows what we are made of and that's enough.  He is our advocate, after all.


What this song also invokes for me a time I confessed to a guy I was dating that I didn't have very many hobbies.*  He suggested that I learn how to play the accordion.  This song makes me want to learn how to play the accordion. At home. In the rain. 

*I know, WTF. This blog is evidence that I have tons of hobbies. But whatever.

three disparate things.

1. I'm reading The Handmaid's Tale again.  After a particularly difficult year of high school, I asked a favored English teacher what to read that summer, knowing that she had to have good taste because she'd done her masters thesis on e.e. cummings.  She suggested Atwood's book. I loved it. It got me thinking about woman's place in the world.

As an undergraduate I pursuaded another kind English instructor to let me do a paper on it. The course of that research introduced me to Phyllis Schlafly, the ERA, the Christian Right, and the LDS Church's efforts against the proposed Amendment. It revealed to me that dirty word: feminism. As a graduate student I've done work on the Eagle Forum and am now working on the Moral Majority. The Handmaid's Tale was written in a very particular moment, and that moment has come to define my career and how I spend my days.

And to think it all stemmed from a very casual book recommendation to a teenage student.

2. When I was living in the dorms at college, I embarked on a mission to a suburban Macy's for a bathrobe. I left the store with a piece of fluff the color of buttercream frosting. It was one of the first times that I said, "damn the costs," and bought something because I liked it and I knew I would need it for a long time.  Now that it's suddenly winter bathrobe season, wearing it puts me back in Pflueger Hall, back in the steamy smell of Dove body wash, back next to the drafty window where I used to sit after my showers. It puts me back in a time before I was an aunt and before my relationship with Mormonism got so fraught. I put on this bathrobe and I go back in time, back to before I knew anything about how good life could be.

And yet I kind of like that my cozy bathrobe takes me back to that time of not knowing any better.

3. Yesterday I went to New York City for the first time. It was big and bustling and dense and busy and shadowy. I only saw a few rushed snippets of the city, and I didn't like it all that much. How do people live there?  Why would anyone choose that? 

And then I remembered that I was in New York City, where I had never been before. That I made choices- a lot of them, big ones- that got me there. That I'd better enjoy right where I was because I'd never get to go to New York City for the first time ever again. Times Square got a little prettier and the people seemed a little nicer. 

New York made more sense to me when it was a myth, but at the very least, there I was. And Philly seemed so blissfully quaint when I returned.

five things the universe is screaming at you.

I will promote any website that features pop art depicting Scandinavian folk symbols. That's a COTGB guarantee.

I follow Rainn Wilson on twitter, and finally made it over to his site SoulPancake. The mission there is to "chew on life's big questions." It's a neat site to check out. As my faith orientation has shifted over the past few years, I find that sometimes I get so caught up in the living of life to its absolute fullest that I don't stop as much to reflect as I could- or the things I do reflect on are more logistical than spiritual. So in the interests keeping it real, I am taking the SoulPancake challenge to

List 5 Things the Universe is Screaming (or Whispering) at [Me]:

1. Stop making lists of people to call and actually call them.

2. Sincerity matters just as much as being nice does.

3. Hiding in bed for another hour won't change anything.

4. You are good enough, smart enough, and gosh darnit, people like you.

5. Just because you are living the dream doesn't mean you get to stop pursuing a higher quality of life.

That's harder than it looks, but a worthy exercise. What are your five?

you know, for kids.

Esteemed COTGB Readers:

I love my brother.

I love Fat Tire beer.

I love bikes.

I love hats.

I even love kids.

Big Brother has ingeniously found away to fuse all those things together in a raffle for the ages. Please get thee to the Tacoma Bike Ranch ASAP to get your name in the hat- literally- to win a handmade piece of American folkart of the highest degree of craftsmanship.

If you aren't interested in checking out the hat, but would still like to give, you can donate to the Mary Bridge Children's Foundation and Big Brother's Courage Classic bike ride to help stop the cycle of child abuse and neglect directly through this link. Thanks for your support!

even santa.

Fascinating slide show on vintage cigarette ads here.

this is genius.

and that's why you don't use a one-armed person to scare someone.

Ever since I woke up this morning the term "gonna teach you a lesson" has been stuck in my head. Immortalized by my favorite episode of Arrested Development, it is an apt description of the major theme of a rally for higher education funding at the Capitol-- "I'm gonna teach those legislators a lesson!" Well we did teach those legislators a lesson, although when we peacefully invaded us their session they tought us a lesson about the fire code because, who knew it, the balconies of the Utah legislature weren't exactly designed to hold 400 bundled up students!* But surely all the kids there learned a lesson about political action and when the budget comes out, we'll see if we actually taught those legislators a lesson. At least they've stopped talking about twenty percent budget cuts, those crazy fuckers.

The real lesson learned today was this:

Don't schedule an interview at the Starbucks at the mall.

Why? Because then you're at the mall, and that section of your budget labeled "shopping" that read "0.00" now doesn't read "0.00" anymore! Gah! The barrage of spring colors at the Gap! Noooooo! I am so weeeak when confronted with pastels!!!!


Pathetic. But my lanta, it is the cutest scarf ever, and the fit of the V-neck cardigans? Don't even get me started.

And while you're not getting me started, don't even get me started on the sublesson of the experience,

Don't go into the Apple Store if you even remotely dislike your PC, let alone hate it.**

You're destined for heartache. I promise.

*But it sure did feel like The Man was keeping us down!

**Didn't buy a Mac yet... but I nearly peed my pants when I saw the Mac Pro HOOKED UP TO 3 FOOT LONG FLATSCREENS. My lanta. WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE LET ME KNOW WHAT MY FUTURE IS SO I CAN BUY OR NOT BUY A NEW COMPUTER?!?!?

love is... never having to equate equal rights with shoveling poo.

I submitted myself to a few hours of mindnumbing microfilmery today and the only things keeping me interested were the number of Love is... cartoons dispersed throughout the paper (1975 Ogden Standard-Examiner!), the fashion trends as manifest through the ads (very similar to what you'd see right now actually) and puff pieces like this:

Having equal rights really is like shoveling shit all the time! Somebody make this lady a candidate for vice-president, stat!, and for goodness sakes, make feminism stop!

eddie would go.

One of my friends shared this inspiring video with me and I thought I would share it with you.

if i had the energy, i'd make a class critique on this one.

Just in case you weren't sure what margarine was.

i'm still working hard, i promise.

Really. I interrupt my regular intensive German translation programming to bring you the most magical song I have heard in a long time. And not only because the lyrics are so incredibly catchy and fabulous. Oh who am I kidding, that's exactly why I love it. I mean come on: "I don't give a hoot about what you think"? Genius.

Weezer: "Pork and Beans."

And when you listen to it, bob your head and smile and dance a little.

Ok, so what if that's what I'm doing right now. Getting back to the German...

distant music.

Last weekend was the first General Conference I've missed since before I knew there was anything to miss. It was strange not to go; it's one of those reflexes that I developed, like saying no to coffee. It was just something I did without thinking about it-- the first weekend of every October and ever April were to be given over to four two-hour sessions of sustained sitting and listening and notetaking-- I even got excited about it! I traveled to Utah for it not once, but twice! It was a big deal to me, I guess because I always went with the expectation that I would learn something new and that, even if it was just a rotation in leadership or some mild shift in policy, something would change. And even if nothing did, I would somehow feel reconnected to the love of God that I wasn't feeling at regular church.

So not going was kind of a big deal. There have been significant changes in leadership, I suppose, that increase the distance I feel from the establishment, but I doubt anything was said last weekend would be rendered unrecognizable by the fact that I haven't been to church since, well, the last Conference. I guess what I'm really saying is that I noticed not going because it was so deliberate. Even in my last push of faithfulness, at that point where I was on the verge of being done but didn't want to admit it, I went. I spent eight hours of my weekend sitting on those new (but still hard!) Tabernacle benches. I didn't even question doing it, even as I flew into a whispered rage about the justifications being used to keep women at home. It's just what I did, it was just how I lived.

I knew all last week that I wasn't going to conference, that I wasn't even going to turn on my TV to watch it, and as the weekend ran its course, I forgot about it. I forgot about it until, on Sunday afternoon, through my cracked open window, I heard music. I don't know whether it had wafted through the valley as they piped it into Temple Square, or just out another cracked window, but there it was. Glorious intermission music, my favorite one to sing part way through because we got to stand up and really belt it out-- How Firm a Foundation.

As the music snuck in, I couldn't help but pause. It was like it was just in the back of my head, and not really realizing it, I sang along.

Fear not, I am with thee, oh, be not dismayed,
For I am thy God and will still give thee aid;
I'll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand,
Upheld by My righteous, omnipotent hand.

I can't really describe what that song does to me. It's written in the first person-- it's not so much a song that we sing to God, but one that He sings to us. The imagery of God actually propping you up-- it's amazing, and despite everything, it's still true. It broke my heart, as it always did, that we didn't get to sing all the verses, as the powerful music gave way to words that faded into an inaudible nothing.

I've heard people say that the thing they missed the most was the music, but I'd never understood it. Sunday I did. Over a matter of years, it wove itself into the threads of my soul; it became a part of who I am. I sometimes forget how Mormon I was, instead looking back at those years as colored by a kind of anomalous, unrecognizable force that externally silenced who I was all along. It was so weird the way the music just showed up, like a fleeting scent in the air reminding me that I'm still getting over all of those years of sustained and diligent Mormanity.

Salt Lake is such a funny place to lose your faith.

everybody's gonna be happy.

Ok, so I'm feeling a little grumptastic on this blessed holiday Monday. As luck would have it, The Paper comes at me with another attempt to change my attitude with a barrage of subliminal pictorial messages:

Fluffy puppies!

Musical magical garden gnomes!

Chocolate game pieces! After playing you could lick the melty off your fingers!

Another puppy! In sunglasses!

Why don't we?

it's raining men.

Some days, The New York Times really gets it right. Today The Paper is filled with many magical pictures of men, in what is no doubt a concerted effort to get the cynical amongst us recommitted to their raging lust for men in time for Valentine's Day.

For example, from Jordan:
See! Men can be fun again!

From the Styles page:
See! Men can be dapper and straight! (the brown shoes with a black suit are a dead giveaway)

And lastly:See! Manimals! Grrrrrrrr!

Ugh. That one really kills the mood.