Fiddley Gomme - Friends

Mocha Momma Memed Me

Pete — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:15:48 -0400

Kelly over there to the Mocha Momma blog
tagged me with a meme.

Normally, I'm not a big fan of meme tagging but I guess I'm just not in the mood to be anti-social. Maybe I'm just feeling the love from the blogosphere and I wanna give a little back. Get I get an amen?

The rules:

1) Link to the person who tagged you.

2) Post the rules on your blog.

3) Write six random things about yourself.

4) Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.

5) Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

6) Let your tagger know when your entry is up.

Six rules. Six random things. Six tags. I like the awkward symmetry of that.

1) I don't get the big deal about ice cream. Never have. Never will. While I watch others gorge themselves with orgasmic glee about a brimming bowl of the stuff, I'm totally satisfied after two or three bites.

2) When I was six, while my younger brother and I were wrestling, I pulled down his pants and bit his penis. Hard. That is to say, I bit it hard. Err... with force.

3) Ben Affleck has an Oscar. OK, that's not about me but can you even fucking believe it? An Oscar. Ben Affleck.

4) I have appeared on stage wearing a felt sunflower singing "You Are My Sunshine". For which I was paid fifty dollars per performance. Suckas.

5) Despite the fact that I lived in Japan as a kid spoke a passable amount of Japanese I have NO IDEA what a Harajuku Girl is.

6) Clive Barnes, the New York Times theater critic once fell asleep during a show I was in during college. Honestly, I don't blame him. A comedy about the black plague? What were we thinking?

OK, fine, six random people... umm... Let's go with people I've never met or whose sites I've never even read before.

Deborah, Erin, Ozma, Surcie, Randall, Nutsy Fagan

I guess I better get to notifying everybody otherwise I might get six years of bad luck in the form of chain letters... or whatever.

Conference Weekend

Pete — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:48:18 -0400

Around our house, LDS General Conference has become and excuse for Donna to hole up in her craft room and scrapbook with a friend. For them, the weekend is meant to be free of spouses and children. An orgy of die-cuts and heart-shaped punches, not to be interrupted by the trivial goings-on of the rest of us.

I, for one, am happy to oblige. The girls and I sit around burping and farting in our pajamas with our hair uncombed and bodies unwashed. We eat anything that can be microwaved or eaten raw. After all, we wouldn't want to leave any dirty laundry or dishes for Donna to deal with once the post-Conference hangover hits on Monday.

The downside is the all-day inundation of hardline Mormon doctrine. The upside is, it's generally the same droned out nonsense we've been hearing for years from them so most of it goes largely ignored. It becomes background noise. Like Coldplay. Every song sounds the same.

He Wastes Time For A Living

Pete — Tue, 08 May 2007 16:44:46 -0400

"Hello?"

"Hey, this is Pete."

"Hey, Pete. Can I call you back? I'm training a horse."

"Err.. OK."

The funniest part of this conversation? I'm sure that's exactly what he was doing.

Later, when he called back...

"Hello?"

"Pete... Steve calling you back."

"Oh, hey, Steve. Can I call you back? I'm in the middle of Hindenburg re-enactment."

"Oh, the humanity!"

"Too soon, Steve... too soon."

Out Of Town

Pete — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:01:23 -0400

I'll be spending this weekend camping and hiking in southern Utah with friends and family. Our frequent trips to the great National and State Parks always conjure the memory of a trip we took a few years ago with some very good, very evangelical Christian friends.

Dave and I stood overlooking the massive canyon carved from the rock by the Colorado River at Dead Horse Point. Dave read from an etched-metal sign to his young daughter. "This canyon was formed from millions of years of erosion by the swift and muddy water of the great river..." He was then quick to teach the youngster that the sign was, in fact, incorrect. "Actually, this canyon was formed only thousands of years ago when God flooded the Earth at the time of Noah. The Earth is not even millions of years old, as we know from reading the Bible."

"Wow," I thought, "he's gonna have some 'splainin' to do when we get to the dinosaur footprints this afternoon."

Instead of trying to reconcile the timeline of the Bible with the observable facts of science, as I did for many years, I have found it much simpler to conclude that Bible is simply wrong. Trust me, that was no easy thing to do in my mind. But once I did, my mind was suddenly clear, no longer muddled with the distracting explanations of global flood geology, dinosaurs from other planets and near-history creationism. The natural world suddenly made sense.

In other words, once I stopped believing in bullshit, it was easy to stop believing in bullshit.

Marathon Of Weird: Day 1

Pete — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 16:30:45 -0500

Though I mentioned this, very briefly, in passing the other day, it is weird enough to kick off the Marathon of Weird.

I can speak backwards. One friend and I do it so fluently that we regularly slip in and out of backspeak without noticing. We started doing it sometime around 1987 or so.

This all started when a few of us got the bright idea that we wanted to be able to talk to each other about girls without the girls in our Mormon ward knowing what we were saying. It doesn't take much thinking to understand now why I never developed any skill for speaking to women in a way that they could understand.

There were three rules for speaking backwards.

No translating out loud. Ever.
No farting. Ever.
Never teach a girl how to backspeak. Ever.

At one point or another, everyone breaks rule 1. It is too easy to do. Someone will say, "Evig em a llac worromot". Instinctively, you'll say, "Worromot? Worromot? Oh! Tomorrow... Give me a call tomorrow! Ooops".

Rule number 2 isn't really practical. It seemed smart at the time though.

Now, for the first time ever, I will publicly violate rule number 3.

The basic concepts for backspeak are pretty simple.

Only words are spoken backwards. Sentences remain in their regular English order.

To make reversing complex words simpler, prefixes are reversed first and kept at the start of the word. Then the root is reversed. The root is followed by the suffix, which remains in tact. So, the word "unenviable" becomes "nu-yvne-able". Some words are, obviously, more straightforward than others.

There's some debate about whether words are reversed phonetically or by their actual spelling. As a result, some words are pronounced a little bit differently depending on who is doing the speaking. This is what most frequently leads to a Rule 1 violation.

"ee-calp"

"ee-calp?"

"Place."

"Oh, you mean, saylp".

The only hard and fast rule on this issue is to do whatever is easiest. Hey, we were like 13. What do you expect, Esperanto?

After not too much work, we had it down pretty well. We were saying things like, "Ainrofilac si ym emoh etats. Ti si eth looc-est ecalp ni eth dlrow" and "Asil Yelckub si eth toh-est lrig I wonk. I tnaw ot regnif gnab reh... niaga."

The problem, as obvious as it seems to me now, wasn't so obvious then. The girls didn't think we were cool or clever. They thought we were excluding them. See, what I didn't know was that women are social. If you want them to like you, you have to include them, share your feelings with them, and actually show them that you are more interested in them than you are in, say, programming your Commodore 64 or blowing things up with firecrackers.

If you're reading this, Sherry Casper, Aimee Hackett, Tiffany Geurts, Annette Wilde, the Borden Twins and all the rest of you Quail Hollow Ward girls... we really, really liked you. I swear we did.

Now, I can only hope that you can understand me a little bit better.

OK, as promised, I will tag Danny, a fellow back-speaker, with the challenge to tell his story about "humping the T". Along with your personal experience, I expect illustrations and examples about both the possible ways the T can be humped.

Inspirational Thoughts

Pete — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 19:45:06 -0500

There's an old set of my scriptures sitting on the end table next to the couch in the family room of my grandparent's vacation home. I'm not sure exactly how they ended up there but last time Donna, the kids and I were up there I saw them sitting there with my full name stamped in gilded letters on the leather cover.

My grandmother had given them to me as a gift when I started high school. The pages are worn and heavily marked. I had once toted this book to and from school every day and to church every Sunday.

One Sunday, I visited the LDS ward I lived in before high school. As my friend Aaron, who still lived in the ward, and I waited for Priesthood meeting to start, Aaron took my scriptures and jotted a note on the inside cover. He then took a roll of clear tape from his jacket pocket and stuck a piece over his inscription, preserving the words for eternity.

I chuckled out loud as I read the words of Aaron still written in the front of the book covered in clear tape.

"A friend with weed is a friend indeed. -Aaron Case"

Wally's World

Pete — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 20:32:39 -0400

I got an email from my old friend Wally over the weekend. Apparently a friend of his had seen the post I wrote about playing hooky a few weeks ago and had passed along a link.

Wally's email was warm and nice. I felt a tiny bit bad about outing him and Sue Geertsen publicly like I did and expected him to say something about it. He didn't. I obviously didn't feel enough guilt to keep me from mentioning it again just now either. I'm sure if I ever get an email from her it will be less forgiving.

Wally reminded me of some very good times I had that summer. He brought me up to date on some of the other missionaries I haven't seen in years. Wally also told me that a spark had been ignited in him despite what some people would call troubles he had that year.

There is a lot about that summer 15 years ago that is still very clear on my mind. I loved it. It's where I found my love of theater - and of sharing the gospel - of performing with the spirit.

I post that because I believe he is sincere. I don't sense that Wally is trying to re-convert me in any way. He's just sharing his honest feelings with me. I post it also to point out the irony that he was sent home from Nauvoo, lo those many summers ago, and that I stayed and even tried to extend my stay into a full-time gig.

I feel bad for having been judgmental about him too. I was the kind of missionary who felt the rules were paramount to the work. I remember Wally trying to educate me on having a little more fun and relaxing once in a while. I thought that made him a bad missionary at the time. What it made him was a good and understanding person.

I'm glad for the good times we shared and I hope there are more to come for us.