School Ain't Over Yet, Sucka!

So my last blog wasn’t as thought out as they normally are, and I went and said something that I’m not so sure of anymore.  The wife and I were talking about this afterward and she brought up an interesting point.

Not to dwell on this terrible scene, but if Caden in fact were to jump off our house, I wrote something to the effect that he wouldn’t fly, he’d fall, regardless of how much faith he had, because you can’t put faith in an incorrect principle and expect it to work out.

Ah but, said Jana, what of Peter the disciple who walked on water because of his faith?  If faith is so strong, can’t it turn the impossible possible?  Parting the Red Sea goes against all natural physical laws, but that happened, so what gives?  So if we were to teach Caden his whole life that if he jumped off our house that he would fly, would he?  His faith would be so pure that it would be just as good as knowledge for him, so what would happen?  Maybe he would fly.  Maybe he could walk on water too.  He hasn’t learned to doubt yet.  (As a side note, is it wrong of me to not want to test out that theory?  Is it demonstrative of a lack of faith on my part?)

Peter (or possibly Caden in his later years)

Parting the Red Sea in The Prince of Egypt

On the other hand, what of all the people out there who put enormous faith into worshipping a false god?  Does their faith make that god suddenly real?  I say unto you, nay!  I guess my question is where is the line between the impossible things that can happen if you believe hard enough, and the impossible things that will never happen, no matter how strong you believe?  Weigh in, posit, hypothesize, submit, propose, opine, whatever.  Go!

School's In, Sucka!

This week I was "babysitting" the kids, as Caden likes to put it when Mom isn't home, and I was trying to get them ready for bed.  After taking Caden to the bathroom and putting a diaper on him for bed, I was running around the house trying to find his pajama pants and couldn't find them.  I only looked for about five minutes and didn't consider them as being lost, just hiding somewhere.  Caden asked what I was doing and I said I couldn't find his pajamas anywhere.  Without missing a beat, he suggested, "Dad should we say a prayer to help find my pajamas?"  You can hear it in your mind, can't you?  The way he ends all his questions on a much higher note than the rest of the sentence cracks me up.

My first thought was, "Well that's a bit overkill, it's not that important, we can find it on our own," but I just said, "Sure, that's a good idea," hoping for a good teaching opportunity.  So he threw his forearm over his eyes and launched into this prayer, appealing to "Henawee Fawdeh" (that's my attempt at spelling out how he says Heavenly Father phonetically), asking for him to "help me and my Dad find my pajamas.  In deh name of Jesus Kwyst, AMEN!!!"  You can guess what happened next; I found the dang pajamas.  And when I gave them to Caden, again without missing a beat, he said another prayer, this time of "thank you for helping us find my pajamas."

This same story has happened on several occasions now, with Caden's lost toys and such, and every time he prays to find something I think, "Oh great, I really hope this praying stuff works."  Then me and wifey start looking everywhere.  But every time, without fail I tell you, he's found what he's after.

I don't want to spell out the obvious lessons that can be taken from this, but I'll probably end up doing just that.  You see, for Caden it is simply a fact that when you pray for help, you get it.  It is not a matter of faith, because it's what he was taught, and it works, so it's knowledge for him.  He doesn't have to exercise faith.  He hasn't lived in the world long enough to know that he could doubt the power of prayer (or anything spiritual), so he doesn't have to even try to believe.  He just knows.

In contrast, I thought I knew, but if I know so well, then why did I doubt?  The temptation is for me to think that the pajamas would have turned up anyway, and that going through the motion of praying was simply to teach Caden a principle, and that it's really just plain luck that it worked out in the end, you know, for Caden's benefit.  But how many times do I have to see prayer work before I realize that when God says "ask and ye shall receive," He's not just frickin whistlin Dixie, He actually means it?  Yeah there was a good teaching opportunity, and Ben just got schooled.

There is something that gives me comfort in all this.  Let's say Caden was taught his whole life that if you jump off the house, you could fly.  Oh he'd fly alright....fly STRAIGHT TO HEAVEN!!!  No amount of believing or faith or knowledge will make a false principle into a true one.  So now, watching Caden's knowledge of prayer work for him, I can rest assured that he has learned a true principle.  Though he does think he can fly off the counter and the table and the stairs and stuff.

PS.  Speaking of Caden, check this out.  ‘Tis the season.

The Play's the Thing

“A movie should not be judged on what it’s about, but how it’s about it.” – some guy, not me, but I wish I said it first

Friday night rolls around, wifey and I are both tired and want to sit/lay down for a couple hours and watch something, and we head to the iTunes store to rent a movie.  Then I remember how differently I watch movies than most people.

Now I’m certainly not trying to belittle other people’s watching habits, but I feel I must explain myself.  Those of you who know me know that I love me some movie-watchin, maybe a little too much.  How does all that random knowledge of dumb movies floating around in my skull help me in life, you may ask?  (It doesn’t, by the way.)  What’s the big deal about movies?  Why can’t I just be content to watch what everyone else watches?  Why can’t I just like what everyone else likes?  Why do I have to be so difficult?  Why why why?

Maybe I’m a bit picky, a movie snob, an arthouse goon if you will.  It seems to me that the majority of people watch movies to escape life, to turn off their brain for 90 minutes, and to relax.  I have realized that I watch movies for the exact opposite reason: to connect, to think, to ponder, to be challenged and enlightened, to feel something.  Oh sure, I can have fun in movies too, we all have our mindless pleasures (Top Gun is pure 80’s radness).  But it occurs to me that people write off certain movies because they don’t want to think, or because it’s not relaxing.  Perhaps some movies get written off because they don’t end with a nice little bow tying up all the loose ends.  Or maybe the possibility that the two good-looking people on the movie cover might not end up together is just too much to bear.  Understand that I’m not saying I don’t like cinematic junk food either, it has its place and all, but sometimes you just need something more substantial.  How would you feel if you could only eat candy bars all day for a year?  (Bad example, cuz that would rule.)

Top Gun is a testament to the awesomeness of the 80's

It all began with Ghostbusters (a great movie, and a perfect example of cinematic junk food).  I was 6, and I became obsessed.  I ate Ghostbusters, slept Ghostbusters, breathed Ghostbusters.  And from this obsession grew an encyclopedic knowledge of everything about that movie.  I’ve watched it dozens of times.  I have it memorized.  I know all the names in the credits.  And that’s how I learned about moviemaking as an industry.  I loved learning neat little things like the real names of the people who played the Ghostbusters, and that there were people who actually sat down and wrote it out, just like how I wrote my own stories on the kitchen floor.  Then I started wondering what the heck a “director” did, what was this talk of “cinematography,” how and why does sound need to be “mixed,” etc.  After seeing a couple more movies I saw a pattern in credit sequences, and even started recognizing some of the same names in different movies.  I learned that the director was the most important guy, cuz his name was always listed before the movie title (a Steven Spielberg film) and at the very end of the credits (directed by Steven Spielberg) in case we forgot, I suppose.

Cracking wise and busting ghosts,

Ghostbusters started it all

And then (this is where it gets maybe too intense) I would start scanning the back of the TV guide, where all the week’s movies were listed, and I would just learn facts about everything.  Each movie would list the top stars, the year it was made, a short summary, and a rating out of four stars.  Some kids read comics, I read the dang TV guide.  I memorized that stuff like it was the Articles of Faith.  I was a sponge.  And I could recall most of these factoids on demand.  It really was quite ridiculous.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was really just the next logical

step after Ghostbusters, cracking wise and busting ninjas

One thing that was rather curious to me was that the movies I liked were always given two or three stars, never four (and to my credit, never one star either).  So I got to thinking that if Ghostbusters was only a three star movie, imagine what a four star movie would be like.  I tried one out and could not even get through more than a few minutes.  (It was black and white, a death sentence for a kid my age.  Can’t even remember what it was.)  So I ignored most four star movies for a long time, assuming they would be old and boring, and in black and white.  I stuck to my type, made it through the Ghostbusters phase onto Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, then to Terminator movies and other assorted action movies.  I remember being quite enthralled with the world of mobsters when I saw The Untouchables at around 9 years old.  The world of the 30’s caught my fancy, and I actually checked out and read several books from the library on Al Capone and the whole Prohibition era of Chicago.  This naturally led into my fascination not only with the Mafia, but with what I thought at the time to be a more mature style of movies.

The Terminator is the stuff little boys eat up like cake

The Untouchables bring down the

Capone mob in a very stylish 30's Chicago

At 11, I still wasn’t quite sold on “four star” movies yet, but my mom had been wanting to show me her favorite movie Dances with Wolves for a while.  I was dreading its three hour length and its “grown-up-ness;” it just sounded like a really serious bore to me at that age.  But I sucked it up and watched it with her.  I don’t know what happened between the time I tried out that old black and white movie and the time I saw Dances with Wolves, but I was floored.  Maybe it was the Injun blood in me, but I had never been so impacted emotionally by a movie before.  The other stuff I was used to watching was fun fluff, but I hadn’t realized that I was missing out on feeling stuff in movies.  Three hours was too short.  I just wanted it to keep going.  Then I watched it maybe half a dozen times more over the next couple months, eating up the fluidity of the storytelling and the cinematic techniques employed to make it pop and bring it to life.

White guy "turns Injun" in Dances with Wolves,

simple story made entirely absorbing by pure craft

You could maybe say that I started to get slightly elitist after that.  For a while, I was only interested in four star movies, and not just ones that the lame TV guide gave four stars to, but I started actually listening to critics and taking their advice.  If there was a movie I wanted to see and then I heard it got bad reviews, I didn’t want to see it anymore.  And vice versa.  It really opened my eyes to all types of possibilities.

Jake La Motta uses boxing as his penance in Raging Bull,

like watching a train wreck in slow-motion

The rise and fall of the Corleone family's New York empire
is told over 80 years and two generations in The Godfather trilogy

Since then, I’ve tried to search out movies of all kinds and not just ones that are about stuff I like.  It keeps me on my toes.  In high school my bro Dan and I waded through the American Film Institute’s Top 100 Movies of All Time list, catching them on TV and, if need be, renting them from Blockbuster.  Yep, I watched every single one of those dang movies.  It was quite an educational experience.  There are movies on that list that have become some of my favorites ever that I might not otherwise have had the inclination to see, others that didn’t quite melt my butter but I can still appreciate their importance and why they deserve a spot on the list, and others still that were a complete waste of my time.  That list put me through a lot of crap, but I wouldn’t have changed any of it.  (I mean the experience.  Not the list.  My own list is another topic entirely.)  Certain movies I was expecting to like really disappointed me (Rear Window), while others I was dreading have since ended up in my DVD collection (Singin’ in the Rain).

GoodFellas hurtles you through three decades of Mafia life
with breakneck speed, by the end you want out bad

Apocalypse Now shows a Vietnam straight out of Isaiah,

complete with swarms of fire-breathing locusts (helicopters)

Currently I’m working my way through all the “Best Picture” Oscar winners, albeit at a much slower pace, but the purpose is the same: to keep my mind open, to learn, to be challenged, enlightened, to be shown something new, to connect, to feel.  The best movies can do all those things.

A Nazi war profiteer realizes the terrible human

price of the Holocaust in Schindler's List

2001: A Space Odyssey is merely concerned with such trivialities as,

oh I dunno, mankind's place in the freaking universe

There's much more happening in movies than just the story.  Next time you watch a movie, look at the reasons why something is shown from the angle that it is, why a scene is lit a certain way, why is it paced the way it is, why the characters say things the way they do, why anything really, and what does all that stuff contribute to the story.  It's all done that way for a reason, and the fun is figuring out what that reason is.  The best movies have answers for all those questions.  The ones that disappoint me are the ones that are only concerned with getting from point A to point B in the plot, without offering anything more.  I would liken it to reading a good book.  Watching movies gets a really bad rap compared to reading books, but to me they both have the potential to be quite a worthwhile experience, it just depends on what you read/watch and how you read/watch it.

Or in other words, yes I'm a snob.

Ben, I Hardly Knew Me

This blog stuff is weird.  Since it’s sort of unknown what the final shape of this blog will be based on the first post alone, this next post is critical to establishing its direction and tone.  I made up a list of all these ideas that I could blog about some day, and I just finished reading over it, and nothing jumps out at me as being the one that logically should go next.  Why does all this matter, you ask?  Well it doesn’t at all, and I’ve stewed over this long enough, so I’ll just pick a topic and yap for a little bit.

We just finished up a family reunion with the in-laws about a month ago in Bear Lake, Utah.  Fun was had by all, but one evening we were all asked to share a thought, be it spiritual, educational, really anything that we felt would be of value to share with everyone.  Most people talked about spiritual matters, and some talked about more than one thing.  That was actually the time I started to seriously consider blogging, by the way, because I started thinking about all this stuff I could say and I had a hard time narrowing it down.  But, narrow it down I did, and I kinda ineloquently rambled on about this topic that I have so much experience about: marriage.  (There really should be a dedicated font type for sarcasm.)

Yes, that means that I’m being sarcastic when I say I have all this experience in marriage.  How do you define experience in something like marriage, where nobody knows nothing?  Who knows what the right things to do are?  We pretty much know what the wrong things to do in marriage are, and so maybe if you go on long enough without doing anything wrong, that could be considered as experience…  Whatever.  In short, to borrow a quote from Yogi Berra, “In baseball, you don’t know nothing.”  Just pretend that, instead of baseball and you, he was talking about marriage and me.  Then the quote will seem less random and irrelevant.

"In [marriage], [Ben] don't know nothing."

So, knowing nothing, I must resort to speculating.  Why must we get married?  Yes yes, there’s that little thing about not going to the highest degree of the ol CK, but if that were the only reason, that would seem a bit arbitrary.  No, I say, there has to be more to it than just that (and there is).  You can’t have a family without being married, true, but again, that seems like more of a technicality than a valid reason for being.

(Before I go on here, I must make a disclaimer that I am clearly not an apostle or prophet or anything like that, so apply whatever grains of salt you will to my words.)

I shall tell you what marriage has done for me.  Back in my post-mission, pre-marriage days, I came to thinking that I was pretty much complete as a person.  I was the man with the plan.  I had it all figured out.  Now, of course, I couldn't tell you what exactly it was that I had figured out, but whatever it was, rest assured that it was nicely figured.  I didn't know what else there was to become.  I thought I was well-rounded enough, that my personality was pretty much already formed to my liking, and that all that was left in my life was the doing, not the becoming.

Yeah well I was WAY OFF.  In fact, you couldn’t be more off than the amount of off-ness by which I was.

Anyone reading this knows all about Jana.  She’ll do anything for you.  They ain’t never was a more giving person.  One of her specific talents is to really find out what people need, or even want, and try to give it to them, simply because she likes to see the people she cares about be happy.  On one occasion, there was a birthday in my family and I was trying to shop around for a gift.  We had sort of an unwritten rule that it should be around $20-$30 for a gift.  I couldn’t tell you who, what, where, when, etc. but I remember that I found a really good deal on this present that was worth about that much, but marked down to maybe less than $10.  I remember feeling like quite the hero.  I also remember telling Jana about all the money I saved.  Her response?  Something along the lines of, “Oh good, now we can get something more to go with it!”  She was serious.

At first I was baffled, then humbled.  Here I was being sneaky and trying to get away with something, and there was Jana, seeing the opportunity to give more.

I never thought of myself as insensitive per se, but sensitivity is something relatively new to me, something that I didn’t quite figure into who I was before marriage.  That’s just one example of numerous ways that I came to understand how incomplete I was.  There are just so many things I didn’t know that I didn’t know.  So it’s all coming into focus.  Just as Dorothy Boyd completes Jerry Maguire, or the Dark Knight completes the Joker (but in a less twisted, sadistic way), Jana completes me.  Insert collective awwww here.

Jerry Maguire completing Dorothy Boyd

Batman "completing" the Joker

Jana completing the Ben-Jammin

Being sealed to someone who can offer you a whole other half of a character is quite something.  That’s actually a pretty good requirement for getting into the CK, not only with your wifey, but with all family members that you’re sealed to.  Perhaps part of the process of obtaining godhood is simply every sealed being filling in each other’s blanks in character (take that with a heaping tablespoon of very grainy salt).

That dang gospel will keep ya humble, I tell ya what.  But at least now I know that I don’t know nothing, whereas before I didn’t know that I didn’t know.  You know?

Jana workin her trash like it ain't no thang

What, Me Blog?

I’ve resisted blogging quite successfully until now.  There was that one time, though.  But still, I done pretty good for myself.  At work I read a lot of blogs and I think I know how it should be done.  The trouble is finding worthwhile things to say (let alone enough things to populate a blog for more than an entry or two).  I mean, I have thoughts and stuff, but does anyone care?  Are they of interest in and of themselves?  Do they need to be?  Are these thoughts worth sharing simply because I think them, or do they need to be examined for worthwhile-ness before they are published?  Perhaps I don’t need an audience, though.  Perhaps simply recording my thoughts on various subjects is itself worthwhile, even if no one but me benefits.

So that’s what I’m gonna do.  I don’t really have any idea what direction this blog will take.  I foresee some entries on gospel doctrine, my family, and the art of the cinema.  Maybe sometimes it will turn into a journal of sorts.  Maybe I will opine on certain topics.  I have no idea.  Just know that, although this blog is open for anyone to read, it is totally for me.  I hope you’re up for the ride, because I don’t really know if I am.