parents, poseurs, and priuses– oh my!

some people just love san francisco and berkeley.

bay bridge-- connects bezerkley to sf... did i mention that i'm also kinda scared of bridges?

i do not count myself among them.

i tolerate sf.  (i mean i’ll venture there to catch a show at the warfield or at, my favorite, the fillmore.  the fillmore hands out these kick-ass art

some guy described these as "purple jellyfish." good description, guy.

posters of the band you just saw as you’re leaving and the interior is wallpapered with history.  it’s worth the hassle.)

and i’m even more tolerable if someone else is driving… unless it’s my dad driving and my mom in the passenger seat.  my whole life my parents have rarely fought, like a real fight with yelling and cursing, etc.  but put them inside a moving vehicle and wait 30 minutes and )))kaboom!(((  you will, without fail,  witness a fight ranging anywhere from mild to moderate, unless the subject of following directions or the “right” parking spot is involved, then it escalates to severe, as in multiple f-bombs (always from mom– it’s inherited) and palpable tension, while those dudes from npr’s “car talk” try to lighten the mood (unsuccessfully) as i squirm uncomfortably asking god and jesus to please, lord, just get us [insert destination here] before i go for the ol’ tuck-n-roll.  i do admit, though, that i admire their ability to move one once desired destination has been reached.  i mean they’re not saints, first they have to each plead his or her case to me while the other isn’t within earshot.  once they’ve vented to their daughter, all can return to normal… until it’s time to go home.  but, to their credit, trips home are less dramatic because our house is always on the same street and there is always parking right in front.  but i digress.

see?

my point is that while i am able to tolerate negotiating the city of san francisco if the proverbial pot at the end of the rainbow (not a gay joke) is awesome enough, downtown berkeley is tolerable only by car and completely intolerable on foot.  berkeley, the one you see in documentaries about the 60’s, is today teeming with with bums and hippies, and ex-hippies driving their priuses and then, during the school year, droves of kids with ridiculous dreadlocks or shaved heads armed with their white bread, mainstream socialist/marxist/anarchist ideologies, topped off with a che guevera t-shirt and an ipod loaded with bob marley.  the rest are asian.  at least the asian kids aren’t confused about

the boyfriend's berkeley-- the nice one

which “subversive” niche they want to endorse.  the asian kids mainly hang around smoking cigarettes that hang precariously from their lips as speak to each other in rapid-fire [insert language here].  now you may be thinking that since i, too, am in college that i shouldn’t be calling these cal students kids.  but, you see, these d-bags are mostly18-22.  now that i’m coming up on 25, i have (in my mind) earned the right to refer to these poseurs as kids, even toddlers or infants if i so choose.  i am aware that part of my distaste for those children stems from jealousy that a) they’re much richer and/or smarter than me and b) that they will already have graduated by the time they’re my age (at which time they will remove the nose rings, throw out the bumper stickers, break the bongs, and cut their hair for their new jobs at fortune 500 companies where they will inevitably rake in six-figure salaries (plus bonuses!) with nice benefit packages (with dental!) and a 401-k plan.) instead of trolling the internet looking for a job that will pay at least 18 bucks an hour.  then i will hate them for a whole new set of reasons.

i, on the other hand, live here, on the island where the mean folk are.  it’s a little crowded, but the weather’s nice.

quarter-life crisis

**sorry for the long break… i’ll explain later. for now, enjoy something i mostly wrote in march with some current stuff thrown in.**

haha, i wish i had this shirt!!

i grew up in a mormon family that attended church every sunday religiously (no pun intended).  i have many fond memories from primary and sunday school, but mostly i remember hating my mother for subjecting me to a saturday night bath and sunday morning hair curling session.  my sister ash and i had nearly identical haircuts when we were little.  sorry, mom, but it was hideous.  we both have brown hair that our mother kept to our shoulders with thick bangs straight across our foreheads.  i hated when my mom would round me up in my sunday slip, plunk me on the toilet seat, wielding what i came to think of as a medival torture device: a curling iron.  my bangs were so wide that it took three sections to curl all the bangs.  my mother, i’m sure, had good intentions, but she often burned the tips of my ears with that effing curling iron and it was always uncomfortable knowing that a hot metal rod loomed just inches from my face.  to this day i never use a curling iron, mostly because my hair is,as my bf jenn says “is straight as asian girl hair,” won’t hold a curl for longer than an hour.

torturous ritual aside, my mother did dress my sister and me in cute dresses with little pairs of tights.  i have two distinct memories involving shoes.  i had one pair that i called my “bert and ernie” shoes (a la sesame street) that were black and white… i think the actual name is saddle shoes or something, but i had a silly childish way of saying just about everything.  i was very cute.  haha.  the other memory is more vivid and it resulted in me meeting the girl who would eventually end up one my very best friends, despite the way we met.  oh yeah, and there’s one involving puke and a hallway, but i won’t elaborate.

i was very little, probably three or four years old and not old enough for primary yet.  kids that age are placed in nursery while their parents attend their own meetings.  i was playing on a plastic horsey that sat on springs so you could rock back and forth and up and down, much more exciting than the typical rocking horse.  for obvious reasons i didn’t want to relinquish the awesome rocking horsey, but as i bounced along, two little girls my age came up to me.  i don’t know why they wanted me to get off the horse or why they had decided to gang up on me, but even at that age i wasn’t about to take that shit.  so i stuck out my petite patent leather mary janes and kicked the two girls.  i mean they clearly had it coming.  well, one of the teachers saw us fighting and the three of us ended up being punished– we had to clean the snack table.  cruel and unusual if you ask me since i was obviously the innocent victim in the whole situation.  one of those little girls, though, was shelbs.

kids have the memory retention of fruit flies, so i guess we somehow forgot about our fight and eventually became friends.  over the years she and i stood out at our middle and high schools as, like, the only cool mormon girls, so we understood each other better than we did the “molly mormons” who we pretty much shunned outside of the walls of the church.  we went to girls camp together.  we walked together during high school graduation (graduates marched onto the football field in pairs).  she eventually went molly on me (just a bit) by moving to provo, ut and meeting a return missionary.  but when they married at the oakland temple i waited outside as her maid of honor, and only bridesmaid.  someday when i get married she’ll be my matron of honor.  now she lives in idaho with the potatoes and white supremists, but i hope she realizes how lame it is there and moves back here eventually.  you’re done with college, so what’s the freakin hold up?

so, even though the missionaries came a-knockin’ at our door the other day (i peeked around the corner, immediately spotted the white shirts and black backpacks that scream mormon missionary, and pretended not to be home… sorry jesus.) most likely on order from on high to continue the campaign to get my parents to return to the fold, so to speak.  i mean, we all know that we are in the right and the rest of the sheep are in the wrong, so until the church receives revelation from god or from inside a hat or behind a curtain, whatever you want to believe, our family will not return.  although i quit going to church years ago, i see my parents coming up on one year of inactivity and feel sorry for them.  or at least for my dad, mom was never into relief society or scrapbooking or making jell-o, so she was kind of regarded as a black sheep.  my dad, though, had a lot of friends there, friends he had known for some thirty years.  so to watch him give up his temple duties and give up a lifetime of friends over politics, important politics, but politics nonetheless, i feel sorry for him.  i’ve been happy to see that some of those old friends of his have reached out to him for lunch or whatever and he returns with reports that they weren’t trying to convince him to come back to church.  they just wanted to let him know that they still loved him and that they still considered him a friend.  when your dad is retired and most days he only has a bratty pug, spoiled daughter, and over-protective wife for company, it’s nice to hear that he is loved by so many others.

yes, my dad is well liked.  i love him very much.  and when he came home today with forms to keep in the fridge for the evidently inevitable day when the paramedics’ ambulance will make a stop at our house to either zap his chest or… well, the other shit they do… well, i didn’t exactly love that.  i have recently lost a little weight, but now that i am afraid to open the fridge the pounds are sure to melt off.  best diet ever?  not so much.  nobody told me that getting older was gonna suck so freakin much.  people say being old sucks, but nipping at the ankles of 25 sucks, too.  your friends are getting married, having kids, graduating from college, starting carreers.  and what am i doing?  i’m avoiding the refrigerator.

ahhh, progress.

my gethsemane… partie deux

you may be shocked and amazed or just plain baffled that someone who just wrote a 1,500 word blog entry, like, 12 hours ago would have a single word left in her. then you’re still getting to know me because although i am often short on cash i am never short on words. anyway, i was still thinking about what i wrote and finally gave in to the unnatural desire to blog at 5am, plus, when your effing pug won’t stop snoring and your mind is racing, what else is a girl to do?

so, i was talking about my feelings for my former religion. my post lit a flame within me that had been blown out a long, long time ago and it just got me to thinking. how do i really feel about the church? am i capable of feeling the holy ghost anymore? and the kicker: will i ever return to the church and be an active member again? and if i were to, under what circumstances? at the moment, i feel like my personal politics interfere with the fundamental beliefs of the church and it’s very likely that this will not change in any significant way any time soon.

the problem is i’m starting to wish i could dress in white and be welcomed into the temple by cute little old men whose white hair match their snowy outfits so that i might participate in some of the sacred (and secret) ordinances that would bring me closer to my god. but usually i snap back to the reality of this wish: only a senile bishop who’d never met or heard of me before would ever issue me a temple recommend… and the senile bishop would only do so after i told him a series of elaborate lies in which i simply skip over the more sordid details from a few years of my life. only after that oscar-worthy performance could i be considered “worthy” to enter a temple.

**speaking of entering the temple, this story may give you some insight into

oakland temple: beautiful on the outside, but don't bother asking me what it looks like inside!

how seriously the church takes its worthiness policy** one of my oldest and dearest girl friends, shelby (i’ll tell you all about her in a future post), married her return-missionary husband in a ceremony in the oakland temple. i’m sure it was lovely, but i wouldn’t know because even though i was her maid-of-honor, i had to wait outside in the courtyard until it was over. usually when i tell people this they think it’s crazy and unfair that the mormon maid-of-honor stood waiting outside during the actual wedding ceremony. i don’t, though, because i understand the reasoning behind it. the temple is a true house of god that has been blessed and dedicated to, well, to god and only those who are deemed worthy in the eyes of the church may enter. it’s like a really exclusive clubhouse. plus maids-of-honor don’t participate in temple weddings the way they do in non-mormon ones. hey, i grew up with this, so, you know, i get it. i wasn’t offended. it did kind of suck to have to dress up and drive to oakland just to take pictures outside the temple, but those are the kinds of things you do for a friend’s big day. **vanity alert** plus i was like 30 pounds lighter at the time, so the photo i have of me and shelby is such a great picture of moi… i’ll have to scan it into my laptop somehow so i can post it here. seriously, i look so cute. oh, and shelby looks nice, too. hahaha. just kidding shelbs.

anyway, i digress… so, i visited the church’s official website out of curiosity and a deep seeded desire to hear something inspirational, something that might stir the still small voice that has become smaller and smaller over the years. i found a 10 minute little video (slightly reeked of propaganda, but what else can you expect from a church production?) that was hosted by steve young **hubba hubba** and some former miss usa, but it also showed clips from some of the adorable late president gordon b. hinckley (by far my favorite prophet– his death last year was one of the catalysts to this whole re-examination experiment). the video was dispelling common misconceptions and myths about the church’s history, its reputation for being isolated from mainstream america, claims that mormons are not christians, etc. like i mentioned, it was a bit brainwash-y, but not in a mean-spirited or negative way. if you get 10 free minutes it might be worth watching, especially if you’re not familiar with the church… plus you get to look at stevie for most of it! i may not attend church anymore, but my devotion to steve young will never die. he’s our boy. go niners!

so, i guess that’s that. i just wanted to get that last bit off my chest. i’ve never admitted to anyone my feelings because with the political climate as it is, it’s not exactly a popular church in the bay area at the moment. i don’t want to say, “oh, when the prop. 8 stuff settles down then it’ll be okay,” because it won’t be okay. i will still remember the disappointment i felt toward the general authority in utah after they issued statements for california mormons, urging them to give their time and money to ensure the passage of the gay marriage ban. i feel like this support of hate legislation (no matter how the church phrases it) just strips away any good feeling i may have been starting to feel again.

and then there’s the situation with my parents. my dad holds the melchezidek priesthood, he can lay his hands upon my head and bless me, he used to volunteer q week at the oakland temple, but when the church decided to get involved in prop. 8 he quietly resigned from his calling and turned in his temple recommend. my parents have stopped paying tithing. i can’t remember the last time someone came by to collect his fast offering (that’s a special tithe you pay the first sunday of each month that goes toward the many lds-run charities or to help poorer families pay for their son or daughter to serve a mission, stuff like that, the kind of stuff that reminds me how much good the church and its members offer to the world…). and each sunday they have taken to going on trips to the beach or to watsonville for fresh fruit or someplace fun like that instead of dressing up for church.

i must say here that my mother was always the best dressed woman in that chapel. while most of those relief society women look unkempt or dress haphazardly in frumpy laura ashley knock-offs with runs in their stockings and ugly shoes with little or no accessories to speak of (unless you count small children hanging on you as an accessory), my mother is a lone swan amid a sea of ugly ducklings. i used to sit on the toilet lid as a child and watch her get ready on sundays. she wears light make-up, has naturally perfectly arched eyebrows (which i pray i inherit someday), smooths on a natural hued lipstick, reddish-brown or nude-y, that complements her outfit *natch* and then, at least she did when i was little, sprinkles lavender talcum powder down her front so she smells clean, but with a hint of provence. then she puts on some very daring, very sophisticated ensemble over her immaculate stockings and silky slip (i used to feel so fancy when i wore slips under my sunday dresses as a child) usually topped off with some fabulous wrap or jacket that doesn’t resemble laura ashley in the slightest. finally she slips her small feet (where my size 8’s came from i may never know, damn genes) into a pair of very likely brand-new heels (my mother owns more shoes than the former first lady of the philppines… ok, i exaggerate but i bet if my mother had all the money in the world she could compete with imelda marcos, who owns like 3,000 pairs of shoes– she even opened a museum which just displayed her collection of footwear.)  lastly, my mother would choose a pair of beautiful earrings and some piece of unique jewelry, a chunky necklace or tiffany bracelet, to complete her outfit.  my mother’s oldest daughter has similar memories of our mother getting ready to go out, so i know that this has been her routine for over 30 years.  tradition can be nice.

so i guess that’s something i’d be losing, that she’d be losing, too, if our family leaves the fold for good.  of course, we’re all sealed together for time and all eternity, so, you know, we’ve still got the afterlife. ha.

fin.  i promise… for now.

my gethsemane… kinda

so, just real quick, i want to explain the name of my blog. originally i was calling it “paris on my mind” (like that song “georgia on my mind”), but i got the idea from the boyfriend that maybe he didn’t care for that name so much because it implied that paris is all i think about and all i plan to blog about. so, to keep the french motif but kind of give a shout-out to where i live, i re-named the blog “dans la 408.” literally this means “in the 408,” 408 being the area code here. anyway, just wanted to clear that up…

i’ve mentioned before that i grew up in the mormon religion. all through my childhood my family attended church q sunday– that’s devoting at least 3 hours to basically a group meeting, a meeting with just those of your age, and then the entire congregation meets together for sacrament meeting– that’s like mass for catholics. as a child you attend primary (that’s where all the kids meet in one large group for lessons and singing **i still remember primary songs i learned like 15-20 years ago** through age 12), then you move up to young women’s or young men’s **i can’t give details on young men’s since i never went *duh* and never really asked my male counterparts about it * i enjoyed church during my teens, besides the going to church on sunday part. i played basketball for the ward (neighborhoods are divided into wards and wards belong to larger, regional stakes–i attended cambrian park ward which was part of the san jose south stake) which i loved because i was on the school team from 7th thru 9th grades, but rode the bench pretty consistently. but at church i felt like a god. i am super competitive and took church athletics very seriously and had one arena where i was the best and could show off and score lots of points. i also played on the ward volleyball team which was fun, especially when my big sister ash and i played together because we were both better than the other girls and we both loved kicking ass. so in a lot of ways church was fun, and it kept me out of trouble, too. when some of my “gentile” friends started drinking and smoking pot in high school, i begged off.

but the absolute best part of being a girl in san jose south stake was camp ritchie. i loved going to camp ritchie. it was just a week-long summer camp for mormon girls and they had other camps all over the country, but from what i hear, none of them could hold a candle to camp ritchie. my camp is up in the sierras, on the side of a mountain with bear lake just a short hike away. we had cabins with wooden bunks and a few years i brought one of my best friends (non-mormon) with me. but otherwise it was me and shelby (aka bonkie… hahaha. i just remembered that stupid nickname, no idea where it came from). shelby and i had grown up in church together since we were like two or three and although her family switched wards after her mom re-married, we still got to go to school and camp together. camp had levels: 1st level for the girls going into 7th grade, 2nd level for the girls going into 8th grade, 3rd level for the girls going into 9th grade, 4th level for the girls going into 10th grade, 5th level for the girls going into 11th grade and finally 6th level for the oldest girls who would be going into the 12th grade. i missed my first year because they did it by age then and i’m young for my grade, so i couldn’t go with shelby and i was never going to go if they hadn’t changed the rules after that year because i would have always been a year behind my classmates. but they did change the rules and i got to go to camp as a 2nd level. 4th level was hard because you went on a 3-day hike through the mountains and missed most of camp, but it was still fun. we slept in sleeping bags and ate gross freeze dried food and i got a nasty sunburn on the tips of my ears, the only place i hadn’t covered with a bandana or sunblock. 5th level is fun because you are basically split into teams of two or three (it was me, shelby, and jennie) and assigned to a younger level to kind of mentor. we went with the 2nd levels which meant we did everything with them, including praying and reading scriptures q night with them in their cabin. shelby and i even got to pick the theme for when we were 6th levels: “the reason for the season.” our idea was that each level would represent a different religious holiday and each day during that week at camp we would celebrate that holiday– so 6th levels were christmas and we got to decorate the lodge with christmas decorations and sing christmas songs. it was silly, but fun, especially because shelby and i knew it had all been our idea. i bore my testimony for the last time at camp ritchie– it was the last time in my life that i would feel close to heavenly father or his son, jesus christ or the holy ghost.

those are the times i look back on as the only times i can remember feeling what the church calls the spirit, or the holy ghost. i could feel god and jesus and for those moments i knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that they existed, that jesus had died for me, that he was my savior, my brother, and that heavenly father listened to my prayers. i never felt alone. i never let doubt or resignation fill my heart. i believed in everything– i believed in the book of mormon and i believed that joseph smith had been a prophet. i believed that the current prophet spoke with heavenly father and received revelations from him. i was a lamb.

i miss those feelings. the boyfriend sometimes asks why i still defend the church’s founding beliefs and it’s memories of that sureness, of that confidence, that makes me do it. i still feel the hole left in my heart where my faith used to be.

i stopped going to church during my senior year of high school. i had already lost grip on my faith and sitting through sacrament meeting didn’t help, in fact it made me feel worse. i couldn’t get that same glow at church that i got at girls’ camp, so i just said fuck it. and that’s basically where i am now. a recovering mormon.

but what prompted this whole diatribe is the fact that my parents have stopped attending church, too. ever since prop. 8 came on the scene my liberal democrat parents have begun to distance themselves from the church. i’m not sure about this, but i would argue that they haven’t stopped believing in the religion, it’s the organization they’re mad at. we don’t agree with mormon politics and when politics are brought into the chapel and members are encouraged to donate money to help pass laws like prop.8 to ban gay marriage, well, we’re not down with that. but the idea of my parents quitting the church that formed my childhood has left me reeling. it’s one thing for me to stop believing. it’s another thing when your ever-dependable parents stop, too. i’ve asked them if they plan on going back. they don’t know. they can’t sit through church knowing that they are the only ones who think the church is wrong to take a stance against gay marriage, to issue statements claiming that gay marriage would injure the sanctity of mormon marriages. i mean gay people aren’t lining up to get married in the temple for christ’s sweet sake– they just want the rights that come with being legally married. how in god’s name is that going to hurt my parents’ marriage? or my sisters’ marriages or my brothers’ or my friends’? how will allowing more people who love one another become a married couple affect straight couples? i wish someone could try to explain the reasoning behind that argument. seriously, i want to know why this is even a problem and why has the church, my church, turned against these children of god and told them they’re not good enough, that their feelings are wrong, are sinful. to me the sin lies with those who prevent others from being happy. the sinners are those casting judgements. they claim the bible forbids it? but the bible also forbids eating meat on friday. the bible says a lot of things that we aren’t supposed to interpret literally. the bible was meant to serve as a source of comfort, a source of guidance. however, you must also use your best judgment and the free will god gave us.

i may get some flack for this– i don’t give a shit. this is how i feel. this is what i believe in now. someday, when the mormon church wakes up and sees the hurt and heartache it’s caused the gay community, i may return to the fold. so now i wait. and so does my heart.

i’m alone on the web

ok, i just spent a couple of hours pressing “next” up in the right hand corner of my screen looking for other blogs to read. uh, apparently i’ m like the only sane person out there. every blog was a either some jesus-loving, right-wing bible thumper or knitting-obsessed mommy blogging about runny noses or the entire blog was in malaysian. really, malaysian. don’t ask me why. and the button kept taking me to the same blogs over and over, like a blog about satellites or something. then there was the really creepy guy who took innocent “family circus” cartoons and drew over them to make them perverted or dirty or just plain scary. i did find a few normal sounding people, one was a sweet blog written by the daughter of a deceased cancer victim who wrote little memories she had of her mother every day to keep her memory alive. that seemed nice, but then i found some guy whose mother sounded like a crazy, red-neck hick and yet he didn’t seem to notice because he continued to post the strange things she said and did (like that her boyfriend is also her ex-husband and that he sold all his prescriptions to pay her rent, so they’re together this week). don’t people realize that those of us who are normal will sit at our computers scratching our heads over how the hell you write about that shit like it’s no big deal? i mean honestly. ugh, and there was some crazy bitch who seemed cool at first, until i kept reading and she started criticizing pres. obama and then wished sarah palin “happy birthday.” gross. sarah palin makes me want to gag. how could you listen to obama speak and then listen to palin and like her better? you’d have to be rush limbaugh, bill o’reilly, the evil ann coulter or this crazy bitch. i feel so… alone. i kept waiting for the button to take me to mom’s blog, but it never did.

ugh, i have to pee again! and charlie is being bad and not going to sleep so i banished him to the den for the night, but i’m starting to get cold and lonely and would like his little warm body next to mine, so i’ll probably go get him in a minute.

i should be writing a report for class tomorrow, but i’m feeling super lazy about school at the moment. i can only put it off until tomorrow afternoon. oh, and i got my fed refund so i paid off both my credit cards completely. feels weird not to owe money, except on my car. and a little bit to macy’s. otherwise, i’m doing pretty well. the debt is about to increase again, though, because i’m getting a new laptop **yea!!** that will work faster and connect to the internet at school. i need a new laptop desperately, but mainly to use for school. journalism majors are also expected to be really good with computers and design and all that, so i need a computer that’s up to snuff. and as attached to this little dell as i am, i’m afraid it’s got to go. like with an old car, i need to trade up.

here’s to trading up, spending hundreds of dollars, and that wonderful high you only get when you’re buying something! hurray!