Happy Halloween

Not bad for my first pumpkin, eh? For some reason, stabbing a sharp knife into someone's face came naturally to me. Hm.



Just one more reason for you to come to the party, of course.

Svoid will be proud of me...

And I will no longer invite viruses in through Outlook Express.

And I will cut down on blogchecking time.

(If you are offended that your sitefeed is not listed, notify me and I will fix that as soon as possible. I just barely set this up so I might have missed some blogs I frequent.)

Oh, and don't forget about the party.

Party Over Here

Want a preview of what next week's wild and crazy blog party is going to be like? Check this out.

Sethillama introduced me to this masterpiece of a music video last week, and, frankly, it concerns me that I hadn't heard of it before. How many people in the world are suffering because they haven't seen this and don't even know it? Hopefully my little act of missionary work here will help rectify that problem. Please, my friends, once you know the beauty of "Just 2 Guyz," spread the love.


DISCLAIMER: Knowing me and seeing something called "Just 2 Guyz" linked from my blog, you probably think you know what it's about. It's really not. I promise.

BLOG PARTY

Here's the deal:

Next Thursday, November 3rd, 2005, Master Fob turns 26, and I'm throwing myself a party. Okay, Foxy J will likely do the majority of the throwing, but I'm doing the announcing.

If you are reading this, you are invited*. Dinner will be served at 6:30 pm and after that we'll party like it's 1999 until 11 or 12. Meaning we'll sit around and talk, and if we get bored we'll pop in a Simpsons dvd. You are welcome to come and go as you please. Unless we tie you to a chair, in which case you won't be.

The party will be at the Fobcave--not this blog, but the place where Foxy J and I live in the real world. (Click on "Fobcave" to find the location of our secret hideout. I've used a special html tag to allow only true fobs to open the link--if you are an eob, it will crash your computer.)

Following are the rules:

• No gifts. Many of you hardly know me and many of you are poor college students, and I don't want anyone to feel awkward because some people brought presents and others didn't. My birthday is just an excuse to get all you random blog people together in the real world.
  
• Wear clothes please. We'll save the nudist party for another time.
• You may go by your real name, or, if you prefer to preserve your secret identity, wear a mask and go by your online alias.
• If you want to contribute to the hardy partying, feel free to bring munchies.
• RSVP in the comment section so we know how much food to make.

*If you live in California, Arizona, Hawai'i, Barbados, England, or anywhere else that's not Utah, buy a plane ticket and I'll reimburse you just as soon as that Nigerian prince I gave my bank account info to gets those millions of dollars to me.

Heaven Somewhere

Each of the rapper Common's albums ends with Common's dad, Lonnie "Pops" Lynn, rapping--in the pre-hip-hop sense of the word, meaning he's talking--on a song. On "Heaven Somewhere" from Electric Circus, Pops says:

Heaven?
Heaven is being Pops.
Heaven is spending the day with your grandchildren,
Listening to their voices when they laugh and play,
And then at the end of the day we hug, we kiss, and slowly they walk away,
And then suddenly they turn and rush back to me and hug me round the knees.
Yeah, that's Heaven to me.

Too many people, I think, wait until they're grandparents to recognize this. It seems silly to spend your parenting years waiting for your kids to grow up, then spend the rest of your life after that wishing you had little children around. I'm determined to enjoy S-Boogie now, while she's young. Days like today, when she's in a good mood and she does cute things like insist Mommy and Daddy kiss before either leaves for work or school, that's easy. Days like yesterday, however, when she has five-minute temper tantrums banging her toy cash register against the bookcase and yelling, "No no no no no no," it's not so easy. I'm glad there are days like today.

Racist

This summer, my sister M, who currently lives in Spanish Fork, Utah, went to Hawai'i to visit the family. While there, she went to the beach with Sister T (no relation to Mr. T) and T's kids. Sister T's eight-year-old son was wearing some red-white-and-blue Old Navy board shorts. Now, Sister T is married to a Chinese-American, which makes her kids half-Chinese, but they're all pretty fair-skinned so, especially when they're with her and not their dad, people assume they're just white. Or, as we say in Hawai'i, haole.

So Sister M, Sister T, and Eight-Year-Old Nephew are walking down the sidewalk at the beach. A couple locals--meaning people who look local because they have brown skin and at least one-sixteenth of their ancestors may have been native Hawaiians--are sitting under a tree maybe five feet from the sidewalk. And as Sisters and Nephew are passing, Local 1 looks at Nephew, then at Local 2, and says, "F***ing patriotic haole."

Sister M shot them a nasty glare (or, as we say in Hawai'i, "stink eye"). To say that about--and in front of--an eight-year-old!

When Sister M told me about this, I was furious. If I had been there, I thought, I would have done more than glare. "What the hell is your problem?" I would have yelled. "You stupid f***ing racist!"

And then Sister T would have reprimanded me for using such language in front of her child.

And, truthfully, I wouldn't have really done anything more than give them stink eye because I'm much bolder in my imagination than I am in reality.

Segue to this past Monday evening. Tolkien Boy and I are in the locker room after another buffifying session of weightlifting. A white dude walks by the brown dude cleaning the shower, then stops, looks at Brown Dude's t-shirt (which I assume said something about Mililani High School on it), and says, "Ho, brah, you went Mililani High School?"

"Nah," says Brown Dude. "I went Kam. But I grew up in Mililani. Why? You from Hawai'i?"

"Yeah," says White Dude, laying the Hawaiian Pidgin accent on thick. "I from La'ie. Our house stay on Naniloa Loop, right across da temple."

They proceed to talk about people they know in each other's church wards. Following are Master Fob's thoughts:

"Who does this haole think he is? There's no way he talks like that naturally. He's just trying to impress the brown dude."

"I bet he's not even really from La'ie. His dad probably did a teaching exchange at BYU-H so maybe he went to two years of high school there. He's probably really from Utah."

"He's not as cool as I am. I was born in Hawaii."

"Stupid haole."

I really don't want to raise my children in Utah. There are things you can learn in a culturally diverse society that you can't learn in a place where everyone looks, talks, and thinks like you. But I really really don't want to raise my children in a place where they'll learn that there's something wrong with having light skin.

Catalogued

Tolkien Boy gave me some good news tonight: I am listed in the BYU Library's catalogue. At first I thought he was talking about my master's thesis, which I knew was in the library and thus in the catalogue, but as it turns out they've catalogued "Getting Out." Now I'm aware that the library carries Dialogue, of course, but it's not common for libraries to make catalogue records for individual articles in a periodical. But they did for me. I'm flattered.

Actually, this goes beyond a pat on the back for me. As I tried to figure out why I was catalogued, I found a lot of other books and articles about homosexuality and the LDS church that were double-listed in the regular stacks and in special collections. So apparently the BYU library is making a special collection of materials on gay Mormons. Which is a way big step in the right direction for an institution that has traditionally tried to pretend that homosexuality doesn't exist. I'm happy for BYU--I don't care what your stance on the issue is, at least be willing to talk about it.