Dormant Last read · last published · next check
Read 17 hours ago and current, but nothing has been published for 3 years.
When I learned about the concept of Foucault’s pipe, it was at a religious university that was so opposed to any form of smoking, we could not even talk about it in the classroom. So instead of showing us the classic, “This is not a pipe,” picture, the professor put up a picture of a chair and asked us: is this a chair? I was so annoyed. Of course it was a chair. I don’t know if he was wearing a…
They come to me in a dream. It’s one of those dreams you’d expect to hear about in church—the kind of dream for which rationality demands dismissal while irrationality demands attention. The problem is you’re not sure what to pay attention to and you’re not sure what to dismiss. And yet, you can’t forget about it. Right before the dream, I am stumbling into my professor’s office, collapsing into a…
True Love is no great thing It is more the wordless gift of a Diet Coke on your bedstand (Because I just thought you would want it later) than it is an epic story of heartbreak and longing It is the hypnagogic kiss, sleepily left on your shoulder, every night, not an ecstasy of moonlight and song Tristan had it wrong Love is not a poison to consume It is white hands reaching to steady you when…
I am a Mormon from pioneer stock. My ancestors crossed the plains with oxen and handcarts, I am Mormon in my ontology, my culture, my history, my assumptions and my worldview. I am also queer. Both my Mormonism and my queerness are integral aspects of my identity, one as equally changeable as the other. Because of this, I am both the best and the worst person to review this book. Autoboyography ,…
When I was a little girl, I started to see a woman when I prayed. My eyes were always closed when I saw her , though I wasn’t always kneeling. Sometimes I lay on my back, rigid, corpse-like. Sometimes I lay on my side, fetal and full of yearning. My room smelled like humidity and wood the first time I saw her. I remember the frame of my waterbed, covered in my baby sister’s teeth marks. I remember…
Shortly after he became prophet, I happened to run into Thomas Monson at Little America. He was escorted, with his wife, to the table next to ours, where we were out eating with our family. Frances, his wife, ordered soup and ate it with single minded purpose, not looking up as people came to talk to her husband. At first, I thought of trying to hide my diet coke, but then didn’t. It was so very……
I am thinking about bodies today. They are eerie and mysterious and they know things and they do things and they affect us in ways we only barely understand. Last night I had PMS. I assume it was PMS. I was lying in my bed, weepy and tired. My lamplight was on, the room smelled vaguely like our puppy--who really needs a bath because damn. I kept trying to think of why I was weepy. What had made me…
I've been following this page on Twitter. It had 3 followers and, like, years of tweets. One-sided conversations. Maybe there was another Twitter account responding, but there were no outside replies, no linked @accounts, posts only responded to themselves. It was, like, this doomed love story. Like watching a broken heart rage and prattle into the void. She posted love songs, she asked how her…
Here is what I know of love: it makes fools of all of us. We can be perfectly rational creatures. We act with sense, with decorum, with measured steps. That is, we normally act that way. But love: it makes us irrational. We find ourselves doing things. Ridiculous things. We cannot control the way our thoughts ever circle. We cannot control the surge of feelings in our chest, our fingers, our…
Found this in an old text this morning. It seemed... useful to the day. What I learned from cancer: you cannot stop your body from screaming. We have this arrogant idea that how we respond to stuff is a choice. We say to ourselves, "Well, I can't help but feel pain, but I can choose how I respond to it, right?" Wrong. When you hurt enough, it does not matter. There is no choice. You will scream.…
