I'd like to give the world a Meg

Wednesday night we went to a Christmas event featuring Meg's children's choir. At least we thought the event was dedicated to the children's choir. It turned out to be a half hour variety show hosted by Laie's version of Marie Osmond. The highlight of the evening involved Santa jumping out of one of the presents on the stage. Kaddi and I estimated that he must have been in there for almost an hour. I hope someone poked St. Nick some airholes.

Here are a few highlights...

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"Who am I? "

Last week the Bishop called me to be the Sunday School Pres. of the Laie sixth ward. For someone who tries to avoid most forms of participation, this is the best calling ever. You don't do anything and people still have to call you 'President.' Just fill in for someone when they don't show up for their class, and remember to push the warning bell on time. It's a far cry from planning an activity every Tuesday night, organizing the occassional scout camp, and dealing with irate parents when their son gets left at the church. So I wasn't too worried about living up to expectations this week when I was sustained in Sacrament meeting. How could I have know this calling would present me with a moral dilemma that would cut me to the quick.

I was sitting in Gospel Doctrine at the end of the second hour counting down the last few minutes like a kid on the last day of school, when the teacher snapped me back to attention by saying:

"Well, I'm not sure how much time we have left. The bell hasn't rang, and I see the Sunday school Pres. sitting here in class, so..."

And I was thinking, "Hey, Poindexter! Get up and push that bell, son. The sooner we finish up here the sooner I can get back...wait a minute..."

I jumped up and headed out the door, trying to ignore the judgemental glances you only receive when you're derelict in your calling. I didn't even know where the bell was located, and by the time I reached the clerk's office it was already five after.

And then I was confronted with the Gordian knot of Church calling decisions. I had been sustained this morning, but I wouldn't be set apart until after church. Technically, I was not yet the SS Pres. Did I actually have the authority to push that button? Or was I usurping someone else's power in some act of unrighteous dominion?

I hesitated and look around for confirmation, but the clerk's office was empty. I knew if I didn't push the button the second hour would go on and on. What would happen then? Sunday school teachers would run out of material, their voices would grow hoarse as they kept telling unrelated personal experiences, their arms would grow weak as they played game after game of hangman until the kids eventually revolted and they collapsed from exhaustion. Did I want that on my conscience?

The seconds ticked by. The red button stared back at me. I felt like I was on the bridge of a nuclear sub deciding whether to authorize a launch. Where was the handbook when you needed it? What mattered more : people or protocol? Should I be Gene Hackman or Denzel Washington? It was all so confusing.

Then I remembered great literary examples who faced similar dilemmas. Huckleberry Finn placed his soul in jeopardy by helping Jim to escape. Carton changed places with Darnay in the Bastille. And Jean Valjean revealed his true identity to the court, freeing an innocent man. I would follow their examples.

I pushed the button.

Did I make the right decision? I'll let history be the judge of that.

We made it chafe and sound

Last night a friend on the faculty called and invited us on his family hike to Laie Falls. A nice guesture. So, this morning Jake, Meg, and I started out on the trails through the mountains of the north shore. I was thinking this would be leisurely 1 km jaunt, something similar to Bear's hump in Waterton National park. It turned out to be 5-6 miles roundtrip. We were on the trail for four hours with sandals on our feet.

Considering the conditions (at one point it started to rain and we took shelter in a thicket of trees) the kids held up really well. It was a challenging hike with steep inclines and slipper rocks. But, we had beautiful views of the ocean and strawberry-guava berries to help pass the time. The waterfall itself was not spectacular if you're used to the Rocky Mountains, it reminded me a little more of the waterfalls we visited in Thailand - but still a pleasant place to sit and rest and enjoy the cool water.

It wasn't until we had started back that I started to feel the discomfort. It started as a mild irritant, but after a mile or so I was feeling the fire down below. Then I realized, I had forgotten to rust-proof my undercarriage that morning! I hadn't had any need for my prickly powder since we left Thailand, but here I was hiking under the mid-day sun, and I hadn't taken the proper precautions. It was an uncomfortable walk back to the car, and the chaffing thereof was great...

Jake and Meg had begun to break down well before we made it to the end, but when we got home they immediately rebounded and headed outside to play with their friends. I'm up and walking again...but slowly...gingerly.

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The November Mailbag

Dear 301NIB,

Why don't we see more pictures of the beach? Are you getting the hang of the bodyboarding yet?

J. Nielsen
Bangkok Thailand

My first few attempts at bodyboarding didn't go so well. I kept my board headed straight toward the beach, got pounded by the waves and rolled up in the surf with my shorts around my ankles. I could taste salt for a week and had sand in every possible crevice.

But I'm still doing better than Kaddi. Last Monday the kids were out of school and so she took them to the beach. Even though its winter and the waves are getting bigger, she still decided to venture in to the ocean. Meg was begging her to go back to the shore, but Kaddi insisted she could handle it. Moments later a huge wave knocked her over. When she finally emerged from the water she found that her favorite sunglasses had gone to Davey Jones' locker.



301nights,

We are surprised and upset at the recent decline in Meg-related content over the past two months. Our statistics show that from Sept. 2006 - Sept 2007, stories, pictures, and videos of Meg made up almost 62% of all 301NIB posts. But since October 2007 that number has been cut in half. Is this part of some scheme to phase Meg out of the storyline? Why would you do that when she's by far the most entertaining aspect of this blog?

Meggie Scrumptious fan club
Mankado, MN

I've told you people before to leave my daughter alone. Why don't you get yourself a good medium and go bother Heather O'Rourke?

Speaking of disturbing, Meg had an usual experience at Halloween. She wanted to create her own candy bag, so she took a regular brown paperbag from the grocery store and decorated it with all sorts of Halloween imagery. Then Meg asked a girl in her class at school if she wanted to draw a decoration. When Meg got the bag back she was a little distressed at the addition. The little girl had drawn a graveyard with one tombstone bearing the inscription:

R.I.P.
Meg Strate
2000-2007



Dear 301nights,

Will the ongoing writer's strike affect your blog? How will you be able to maintain such a high level of quality without your writing staff?

Jeffrey Katzenberg
Bel Air, CA

301NIH writers are not part of the Writer's Guild of America. But inspired by the example of their Hollywood colleagues, our writers began examining their own contracts. When they discovered that they are scheduled to receive less than 2% of the Mack Strate t-shirt revenues through 2011, they decided to go on strike also.

I have no intention of giving in to their demands. Instead, I've replaced them with their Mexican, non-union equivalents. Sure, all the blogs will be written in Spanish, but we were going to start targeting the emerging Latin American markets anyway. It's just good business.

So, in the future be sure to check for insightful and amusing posts on the following topics:

- Hugo Chavez's mother-in-law visits the Presidential Palace

- Two-minute tomales

- Are you dating a Chupacabra?




Dear 301NIB,

It looks like the Cougars are once again headed to Las Vegas. Do you think there's any chance they could be added to the Pac Ten so they play in a real bowl?

Mark Lamb
Centerville, UT

The topic of BYU sports is too painful for me to talk about since my recent run-in with Lavell Edwards. The Coach is here in Hawaii for the week-long business conference at the university. We were sitting in church on Sunday and Kaddi noticed him sitting in the row behind us. When I saw we were both wearing tan pants and blue shirts I knew I had to go talk to the Coach. When I thought the time was appropriate I approached him and asked if I could take a picture. I'd always heard Lavell was a cool guy, but he completely blew me off. It was harsh blow for a life-long BYU fan like myself.

Maybe I should have waited until he was done taking the sacrament.

Citizen Jake

Last week Jake received the Super Citizen certificate at this school. It's an award they give out at Laie Elementary in recognition of turning your homework in on time, raising your hand, and not beating up other students. We celebrated this special occasion by getting a picture of Jake, his certificate, his lovely mother, and a local area man eating an ice cream cone.


















As part of the package, parents are expected to buy large amounts of candy from schoolyard vendors to present to their kids. We didn't want Jake to feel left out so we got him some candy as well. But in an unexpected twist, when he got home the candy was confiscated by the candy fairy, who then proceeded to eat most of it while lying on the couch watching the Cowboys-Giants game.

Girthy

Now that Kaddi is great with child, we get increasing amounts of mail asking for pictures showing her in her final trimester. We at 301NIB understand the value of giving the public what it wants, whether it be an analytical look at the protests in Burma, or a fetus floating inside a mystical orb. So, enjoy our pregnant pause as we celebrate these photos Kaddi and baby Snerdley. (Not pictured: Snerdley).




Why is this woman smiling? Because nothing makes pregnancy more enjoyable than carrying laundry out the door, down the stairs, and across the street to a communal landromat. I'll take my whites with extra rust stains, please...





Despite her condition, Kaddi is never too exhausted to make dinner for her family. I would help too, but there's not enough room for both of us in the kitchen.





Meg takes time for a morning photo before asking her routine question, "Will you make me waffles?"

Barbarian, Modern, Feminine

One of my favorite things about teaching history is trying to dispel the universal belief that our generation represents the apex of human development. In our World Civilization course we acknowledge how we have benefitted from discoveries made by our ancestors. We also try to uncover mentalities and problems that transcend time and culture, that are universal to the human condition.

This subject came up last week when we were discussing the Tang and Song dynasties in China. Increasing trade and wealth threatened traditional Confucian social structures, which provoked a reaction among the patriarchal order. This is the era when the practice of foot-binding became popular. Aristocratic mothers would bind the feet of their daughters, folding up the toes in the shape of a lotus. As the foot grew, the bones in the feet would actually break as they expanded. This permanently crippled the young woman.

The Chinese did this for two reasons. First, Chinese men found tiny feet very attractive. Second, if women were crippled they were not able to go out on their own. It was an sure way to make sure a woman stayed in her place - the home. Foot-binding was eradicated in China during the early twentieth century, largely due to the influence of western missionaries. Noting the reaction of shock among some of the students, I asked them if the Christians were right to eliminate foot-binding, or if this was simply another example of imperialist arrogance in altering indigenous culture to make the world more European.

At Wisconsin this would not be a provocative question. Those students are so laden with 'white guilt' that the minorities are the heroes of every narrative. Imperialist are always Caucasian males, always in a dominant position, and therefore always wrong. But at BYUH, where most of the student have yet to be indoctrinated by post-modernism and post-colonialism, there are still lots of students who still believe that western civilzation has some redeeming qualities.

Inevitably, a female student raised her hand to say that, of course the elimination of foot-binding was a positive thing. It was a male-inspired practice that crippled women solely for aesthetic purposes. Our culture may not be superior, but at least we treat women with a greater degree of equality and don't force them to suffer in order to conform to some male-inspired ideal of beauty.

This, of course, is exactly what I had hoped someone would say...

I then ask students if they are familiar with the term 'corset'. At the same time Chinese women were breaking their own feet, European and American women were cinching themselves into a painful contraption designed to narrow their waists and create the hour glass figure men found so attractive. Corsets caused physical discomfort by constricting a woman's diaphragm and making it much more difficult to inhale and exhale. There's a reason why Jane Austen characters are always fainting at an emotionally traumatic development - they can't breathe.

Even worse, scientists have determined that the tightness of a corset impeded the natural growth of a women's spinal cord. Many aristocratic women developed back problems and even scoliosis from wearing such tight-fitting apparatus. All in the pursuit of beauty.

Thankfully, corsets are no longer the style and the modern woman has been sufficiently liberated by the feminist movement that she no longer submits herself to such painful or dehabillitating procedures in order to appear attractive. Except perhaps to wear high heels, or inject collagen into her lips, or insert large sacs of saline into her body in order to...enhance...certain feminine features. I then show them slides of the evolution of the ideal female body type - from the cherub-like physique of Titian's Renaissance nudes, to the voluptuous femininity of Jane Russell during the Depression, to the stick figure Kate Moss ideal of the nineties, to the mandatory rock-hard physique of today.

The point of the discussion (I hope) is not to degrade women, but simply to point out that our culture is not so very different from the Medieval Chinese. Both societies conceive of ideal notions of beauty, and require women to engage in all sorts of bizarre rituals in order to achieve it. All of our advanced technology has not prevented us from acting out some of the same primitive behavior as our ancestors.

It is generally a very postive discussion, and a gratifying experience to watch students try to re-position themselves as their pre-conceived notions of superiority towards other cultures or eras gradually erode. For students it can be very disorienting to realize that our own ideals of beauty are not universal, and that instead of reflecting our own individual choices, these decisions are often made for us by the subtle marketing of clothing, makeup, and sporting goods manufacturers. They come away feeling a little perplexed and disoriented, and begin wondering what other assumptions they should begin questioning.

I know they feel this way because that's exactly how I felt many years ago, when my World Civ professor did this to me.

Under Pressure

Today at 9 PM Jake completed his science project. It was an enormous project that required contributions from all of us.

Kaddi conceived of the project. She bought all the materials. She typed out all the information. She formatted the storyboard and cut out the materials

I supervised the experiments and drove to my office in the middle of a thunderstorm so I could print out all the information for Jake's posterboard.

Jake's contribution consisted of watching the experiments and gluing all the information to a posterboard.

In the end, Kaddi and I learned that the match causes the air to expand and rush out of the bottle. When you seal off the bottle by placing an egg on the spout it creates a vacuum, because the pressure inside the bottle is less than the pressure outside. The force of the outside air rushing into the bottle (in order to equalize the pressure)is what forces the egg downward.

Jake learned that he doesn't need to worry about large projects because, in the end, his parents will do it for him.

All Hallow's Eve

Last night we experienced Halloween here in Laie, where we danced liked children of the night. The night before we had a ward party with games, costume contests, and more dancing. The kids had a costume parade at their school where Meg got to show off her HIgh School Musical cheerleader costume. The kids are off today and tomorrow. This begs the question, when do they do any learning?

There was a spooky laundry room here at Temple View Apartments, which had more than one kid in tears by the time they were through. Then it was off to plunder the faculty townhouses before hitting the climax of the night - Moana street. There were hundreds of people out trick-or-treating and admiring people's Halloween decorations. At one point Jake and I got caught in a rainstorm, and had to seek refuge at a nearby Luau. Somewhere in all that revelry Jake lost the muzzle of his Jengo Fet gun, and I lost our camera case. A small price to pay for the amount of candy collected (which Meg and Jake have promised to share with me.)

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