It's happened.

I am officially a nerd. Maybe I was before, you know, because school's always been important to me but...in no way can it be denied now.

Against all self-respect I understand this t-shirt:

Next stop:
Conquering the world one realm of knowledge at a time.

Judge for yourselves.

Halloween is always a little bit hard for me. It's tough to find a costume at the last minute that you feel creative in. And every year, I leave it to the last minute.

This year I thought I would go with something practical. In order to test the accuracy of my apparent celebrity look-a-likes I decided to dress up as one of them. I've only got two. One is a character from a horror film...the other from a cartoon. My facial features are really diverse.
Since I couldn't really pull off Clarice Starling without a convincing Hannibal, I dressed up as Jessie from Toy Story instead.
So what do you think? Are the reports accurate? And yes, Buddha is actually a pregnant woman and that is a real human being in the upper right of that photo.

Everything is illuminated in the light of the past.

I went to Washington D.C. recently and was filled with new-found respect and admiration for the founders of this, the United States. For colonists who had the strength to win independence from a king and grant us popular sovereignty and, with it, popular responsibility. For people who, though imperfect, stood up for freedom and human dignity. For men who had respect and admiration for God; who built our nation on ideas of religious principles; who placed religious freedom first in the First Amendment of the Constitution.
The 'separation of church and state' was never about quashing religion - any religion, but avoiding one that was federally mandated - a repeat Church of England.

On the wall of his memorial building, Thomas Jefferson is quoted thus: "God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever."

Let's go back to the days when freedom OF religion didn't mean freedom FROM religion; when "an opinion is no more disqualified for being ‘religious’ than for being atheistic, or psychoanalytic, or Marxist, or just plain dumb;" when the people of this nation stood behind the phrase, "In God We Trust." I don't pretend to know much about political justice or the rhetoric of what's termed political justice now, but I will pretend to care. Let's go back.

Let's bring it back.

I highly recommend this talk by Elder Oaks given just 5 days ago: Religious Freedom. Taste it, love it, crave it.

Get it while he's hot!

I just wanted to draw your attention to the free song on eMusic today.

I don't know how you could resist: those baby browns, that hairy...everything... Indiana Jones has his whip and a universally understood hatred for snake Nazis. James McMurtry's just got his song.

Life.

If you ask your teacher a question during a test and he tells you how to set up your problem, is it cheating? What if you went up there with the explicit hope that he would do just that?

If you got a long group email from another teacher inviting you--in the midst of other personal updates--to the Red Iguana over Fall Break with other students, graduates, and the secretary of the College of Engineering...would you go? What if he started talking in third person and discussed his horoscope?

If a voice in the bathroom stall next to you politely asked you for an unmentionable (named thus because of mixed-gender readership), and you gave her one, would you wait to emerge until she left the bathroom or would you brave the seemingly inevitable face-to-face encounter?

If, while studying for a test, one of your classmates came up to you and asked if you'd be interested in dinner sometime and after stating, "Oh, wow..." you ran through every excuse in your head including, "I'm dating someone," because you weren't at all interested in dinner sometime but didn't know how to say no; and eventually you just said, "...sure..." because he was just standing there waiting for an answer and thankfully, instead of getting your phone number he handed you his business card...what in the world would you do? It's just, I know someone...who has a friend in this situation so...they'd, uh, like to know.