Familials

I've been feeling slightly sentimental lately so I thought I'd put up some favorite pictures of my cute family.



I realize that David's in only one picture but I don't think he likes us as much as we like ourselves. I'll let you figure out who's who on your own. Ok, I'll give you one hint: I'm the really pretty one with dark hair...

How I came to work for the Church Archives and subsequently lost my testimony.

Yep, that's me: an occultic weirdo pawn. Excuse me for a moment while I file down the horns in my head. It's really embarrassing when people can see them.

For those who are unaware, the Church (and here I mean the great Mormon empire of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) owns a large collection of anti-Mormon material. Why, you might ask? Well, there is a mandate in the scriptures in Doctrine and Covenants 85: 1, 2 that says, “It is the duty of the Lord’s clerk, whom he has appointed, to keep a history, and a general church record of all things that transpire in Zion…and also their manner of life, their faith, and works; and also of the apostates who apostatize after receiving their inheritances.” So if one wanted to look up some anti-Mormon literature, really, the best place to get it is in the Church History Library itself!

Here’s a brief list of typical titles available:

The Darker Side of Virtue: Corruption, Scandal, and the Mormon Empire...you see? Mormon empire. They know what I'm talking about.

Speaking of Mormon empires, how about...Brigham Young and His Mormon Empire

Claims against Mormonism, v. 1 AND 2

Joseph Smith’s Plagiarism of the Bible

What the Mormon Missionaries Don’t Tell You

And my favorite…Mormonism: A Gold-Plated Religion, where the authors (former Mormons themselves) explain the Mormon mindset and give “practical ideas for sensitive aftercare for those who have left the organization.”

In case that’s above your reading level (though I can't imagine these books being anything but troglodytic), we’ve also got A Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Mormonism and Mormonism for Dummies.

It's almost difficult to know where to start isn't it?

It’s about war. Peace…anti-war…peace.

I don’t often make goals, and I keep them .00176% of the time, but last night I finished a goal that I had made: to read War and Peace. This book is included in the collection of “Great Books of the Western World” and is named as one of the “100 Most Influential Books Ever Written” and “1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.” Not to mention the lists, “22 Books That Alternate as a Weapon” and “Books to Use When a Ladder Won’t Do.”

With such a rap sheet, one would expect to feel a sense of pride after an accomplishment of that magnitude. A sense that, “You wouldn’t understand this book even if you undertook to read it...which you probably won’t.” A sense that I had become culturally refined merely by reading it. Perhaps it’s because I run in circles where I’m struggling just to keep up, or maybe because I didn’t understand the book myself…but I don’t feel relieved, unburdened, or refined. I feel like I should still be reading it. When I finished, I put it down and I felt like I should pick it up again, but there was nothing left! I suppose that’s what happens when you work on something for 5 months and finish it without closure.

Instead, I am left feeling…intrigued. I didn’t like the way the book ended. There was no conclusion, unless you call a 40 page monologue on historical philosophy that in no way enlightens the storyline a conclusion. Despite the ending, despite the 354 characters and the 32 variations on their names, despite the less than ideal love story, despite the fact that I didn’t get anything out of it other than a strong impression of Tolstoy’s contempt for the supposed genius of Napoleon and the error of historians, despite the fact that I didn’t love it, I loved it. I feel like I know I read something amazing but I’m not sure what that means, and I want to read it again and again until I do. And for a 1500 page book, that’s saying a lot.

Unfortunately, unless I live an extra hundred years I won’t be reading War and Peace again. Let’s be realistic, I have 1,000 other books to read before I die.

Paranoia: mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions.

In my mother's old(er) age, she's becoming more and more paranoid. Not the normal paranoias like "my children are going to end up in prison" or "someone's going to eat the 7-lb bag of M&M's I have stashed in the guest room." Don't get me wrong, she's paranoid about those things too, but those aren't the ones I'm referring to. I'm talking about the paranoia that, while white-water rafting, she'll be thrown from the raft and drown; that the rushing water will envelop her and never let her go. I'm sure you're thinking this is an understandable paranoia...and I agree. Raging waters have always been frightening, and I'm not talking about the water park near Salt Lake. However, to truly picture the degree this has reached, allow me to continue (oh wait, you don't have a choice).

One can always tell when my mom is thinking about death by water because she'll jump. I'm not talking both feet off the ground, vertical leap jump. I'm talking about whole body shudder jump. In fact, I imagine she's exhibited a few of those just reading this. But wait, there's more! My family has been thinking about taking a trip to Africa. One of the options on this trip involved rafting in an alligator infested river. We didn't choose the river specifically for that, but it doesn't matter, all of the rivers in Africa are alligator infested...so I imagine. My family was talking about this trip one day and my mom reached up and accidentally knocked her glasses off her head or the table or...any number of things glasses can be knocked from. My mom reached down to pick them up and...jumped. She was imagining reaching into the river when suddenly an imaginary alligator swam up and bit off her arm. So my mother, one-armed and unable to see, refused to participate in anything that involved both the untamable thing called water and man-eating animals.

Just recently I learned that after the bridge collapsed in Minnesota, my mom thinks about it everytime she crosses a bridge. While driving over a bridge, she imagines herself tumbling helplessly into the roiling and frothing maw of the river below until she happily drives onto solid land on the other side.

The great thing about my mom is that none of these paranoias seem to stop her, either from acquiring more children, buying 7-lb bags of M&M's, driving over bridges, or continuing to have adventures and, despite what she says, actually enjoying them. That's not going to stop my brother, John, and I from saving up our money for a new addition to the house, though. It will be located underground; surrounded by lead, cement, and packed dirt; and come equipped with enough supplies to last over a month, a battery-powered radio, and potassium iodide tablets.

What comes of a weekend with no plans...

I never really thought I would find myself here.

Ok, so maybe I had high hopes of having my own website--something exciting and completely above the world of bloggerdom. However, despite my many talents, I have not yet achieved fluency in HTML.

Because my parents and I don't talk to each other and succumbing to the weight of the extremely high number of detail requests about my life (see Appendix A above), I am blogging. Which is kind of like clogging, but with less foot movement.

I can now say with pride that the much anticipated day has come when Laura A. Shearer appears on the web as something other than a retailer of natural beauty products.