In relation to the last post. There are two great hikes in Kanarraville. The one at the south end of town where you don't have to cross water that much. And the falls trails where you are always crossing the water or in water. I would like to explore both more. Those would be great options as we wouldn't have to drive very far.
In relation to psychology in the title: I have lots of random hobby topics that I research and one of those is psychology things. I have often wondered why I am the way I am--not that I believe psychology can answer all those things or that it provides the understanding of the origin either, but they have excellent research that I tie in with spiritual understanding. Sometimes I have found something about myself either by experience or even something mentioned in my patriarchal blessing and I can google those things and learn a lot.
All this is typed on the fly, so my thoughts aren't too organized. I should have given a ramble alert.
One thing I've learned about is the high sensation seeking trait. Some people are wired so that they need more sensation. There are a variety of outlets for these people--good and bad. Bad outlets: drugs, crime, sex, etc. Good outlets: adventure, travel, creativity, etc. I have always explored my surroundings. From my first neighborhood I would venture out into the fields and explore for miles around. Same thing in Cedar, in Provo, and in Cedar again. I need to see new canyons, caves, peaks, valleys, etc. I have also channeled some of this into creativity. Exploring new ideas, stories, images, and sounds is fascinating as well. Yet, I can't do just one of those things. I always yearn to travel in the real world and in the imaginary.
Now, psychology might say that I was born this way or that my brain became wired this way as I grew up, yadda, yadda, yadda. I believe that this is part of who I was before I was born. My stake president told me "Your mission will be a great adventure." Inspired words. I think Heavenly Father said the same thing to me when I came down to earth. There are things for me to explore here in this life. However, some of these things I explore for others as well.
That's why I adventure. That's why I travel. That's why I dress up in silly costumes, talk in accents, jump off things, climb things, make up stories, imagine crazy things. I think that's all for now. I'm hungry.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Man Camp
I think a camp out once in a while is a great idea. Time out with the guys, in nature, away from all of the hustle and bustle... we could finally pull off a real Starcraft party without interruption.
Just kidding...
I have fond memories of when James and I hiked Pine Valley, spending the night off the side of the trail in some random place, just because. Or rather, a fond memory, because we only did it once, but it was fun.
We wouldn't necessarily have to backpack, but I know there are a few hundred awesome places around here that I've not experienced, places like Kanara creek falls, or even places somewhere between So. Utah and our No. Utah counterpart.
I second the motion, and propose we get something on the calendar. Just stick it on there. It may be unlikely to get all of us at the same time, but let's plan something anyway. 2nd or 3rd weekends in June, or sometime in July is my pitch.
Just kidding...
I have fond memories of when James and I hiked Pine Valley, spending the night off the side of the trail in some random place, just because. Or rather, a fond memory, because we only did it once, but it was fun.
We wouldn't necessarily have to backpack, but I know there are a few hundred awesome places around here that I've not experienced, places like Kanara creek falls, or even places somewhere between So. Utah and our No. Utah counterpart.
I second the motion, and propose we get something on the calendar. Just stick it on there. It may be unlikely to get all of us at the same time, but let's plan something anyway. 2nd or 3rd weekends in June, or sometime in July is my pitch.
Friday, March 23, 2012
The New Adventure Glove
Some of you may find this trivial and mutter something under your breath about your inbox being filled with my random posts...but this...is magnificent.
I was walking through Cal Ranch when the glory days of high school adventure came back in a rush. There on the wall was something reminiscent of those days, yet more advanced, sleek, and powerful. I present to you the Carhartt Pro-Palm Glove, lovingly termed by me as "The New Adventure Glove.
My wife promised to get me some for my birthday, but I think she's hesitant now. As I slipped the form fitting piece over my hand I could feel the power my hands were wielding. Instantly I wanted to go climb the alley by IFA (old Albertsons) or explore the mine in Milford or tackle some new and...less criminal adventure.
You see, my gloving days go back to when I lived in Vernal. I was probably under the age of ten when I learned you could climb the posts of our pavilion with my mom's yellow-rubber cleaning gloves. I did that every time I cleaned. Later in life I found my black leather work gloves very suitable for adventuring. Of course they didn't have the stick factor of dipped latex or anything, but they had good grip and were well used in scouting. They were the ones I used when ascending the heights of our former educational institution. I still have them in a box somewhere. Maybe I'll put them on display in a glass box someday.
Later my father gave me some baseball batting gloves that had been on sale at a sporting goods store--a combination of fabric, leather, and a small amount of rubber. I used these often too and wore them out. Later I bought some while in Provo and they were invaluable when I was descending many steep, wooded mountainsides. You can descend incredibly steep graded hillsides when you can grab onto the trees. Let me tell you--it's the ultimate bush-wacking experience.
SO, if anyone wants to do something...exciting this summer-let me know. Ghost towns, crazy canyons, etc. I know, we've got kids and wives. But I've got adventure gloves and we need camping with the guys and such. OOh...adventure gloves are calling.
I thought about making a Ked's poetry corner for these, but not enough time.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
The Mine
So, I went for a drive with Madeleine and Mairead the other day. I decided to pay a visit to our old stomping grounds to see what had changed. Like somebody had said, the place had been reopened and this is what is there. New towers, conveyor belts, etc.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
An Idea
Over the past year or two I have thought about a subject that has penetrated deeper into my life: personal apostasy. I've had family members leave the church, but that was a while ago. In the past few years I've had several roommates leave the church, some declare they were homosexual, etc. I've really thought long and hard about why people leave the church. That is not exactly why I'm writing here today.
Sometimes when people leave the church they become antagonistic towards it and religion in general. Back when I checked Facebook more regularly I was always disappointed in friends posting huge essays (along with daily smaller comments) about religion being stupid or some intellectual reasoning against religion. Also many essays on homosexuality, anti-mormon propaganda (kinderhook plates, temple ceremonies, etc.) and other things.
It was as if the social network was not only good for keeping in contact with friends, but spreading beliefs be they true or untrue. I have often thought to combat this.
I was religion writer for the newspaper at BYU and I wrote for LDS Living. I've come into contact with uber amounts of anti-mormon propaganda, interviewed religion specialists from across the country. I think it could be a good thing for me to do, given a certain amount of dedication.
Most recently I heard of a couple I knew very well from high school. I even had a crush on the girl for a while. I thought these individuals were spectacular and that together they were amazing. They have now left the church and are somewhat anti-religion. They have made me think more about this project. I often thought about doing it alone, but decided I'd throw it on here for thoughts.
What if we started an essay blog or essay collection on facebook. We could call it Writers for Religion or something. If we had more time, we could do a podcast. Basically, this would be like a religion column in the paper, like the ones Orson Scott Card does for Deseret News. It would be about religious topics that we feel are pertinent to our time. One major one I would want to do is the logic of God. If our faith is to be tested, would God give us a 100% fool-proof scientifically proven test? Would there be questions about ceremonies, archaeology, the Book of Abraham? I've written some about this because I had a roommate who loved logic, but couldn't see this simple logic for why we have unanswered questions about our church.
Any thoughts on the subject? It could be another project we toss in the trash can, but I might still do it alone....sometime in the future. I see the great value of it and what it could become. It would just take some effort.
Sometimes when people leave the church they become antagonistic towards it and religion in general. Back when I checked Facebook more regularly I was always disappointed in friends posting huge essays (along with daily smaller comments) about religion being stupid or some intellectual reasoning against religion. Also many essays on homosexuality, anti-mormon propaganda (kinderhook plates, temple ceremonies, etc.) and other things.
It was as if the social network was not only good for keeping in contact with friends, but spreading beliefs be they true or untrue. I have often thought to combat this.
I was religion writer for the newspaper at BYU and I wrote for LDS Living. I've come into contact with uber amounts of anti-mormon propaganda, interviewed religion specialists from across the country. I think it could be a good thing for me to do, given a certain amount of dedication.
Most recently I heard of a couple I knew very well from high school. I even had a crush on the girl for a while. I thought these individuals were spectacular and that together they were amazing. They have now left the church and are somewhat anti-religion. They have made me think more about this project. I often thought about doing it alone, but decided I'd throw it on here for thoughts.
What if we started an essay blog or essay collection on facebook. We could call it Writers for Religion or something. If we had more time, we could do a podcast. Basically, this would be like a religion column in the paper, like the ones Orson Scott Card does for Deseret News. It would be about religious topics that we feel are pertinent to our time. One major one I would want to do is the logic of God. If our faith is to be tested, would God give us a 100% fool-proof scientifically proven test? Would there be questions about ceremonies, archaeology, the Book of Abraham? I've written some about this because I had a roommate who loved logic, but couldn't see this simple logic for why we have unanswered questions about our church.
Any thoughts on the subject? It could be another project we toss in the trash can, but I might still do it alone....sometime in the future. I see the great value of it and what it could become. It would just take some effort.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Thursday, October 6, 2011
A Man
Like a good many historical figures who've come and gone on this Earth, I think Steve Jobs gets a good deal more reverence than he actually deserves from people who don't even know him. However, he's a person I've thought about a lot (not just in the last two days), and I think I'd like to distill some of those thoughts here. I hope you don't mind.
I have to admit that the sudden passing of Steve Jobs had more of an effect on me than I expected it would. While I have been what might be called an Apple Fanboy for a very long time now, I've really only owned about four Apple devices in my lifetime: my current MacBook Pro, the PowerMac G5 that Gemini bought, a 1st gen iPod Touch (2nd-hand), and an Apple //c I picked up at DI a few years back so I could remember the good ol' days. I've never met the guy, only seen him in video clips from the heady beginning days of the personal computer industry and at the more recent product launches. We have known for a while that he was ill, that he was going to die sooner than later, but even so, I was surprised at how sad I was to think that he'd actually gone.
Steve Jobs was an influential person. That much can not be argued. I take issue with the idea that he singlehandedly "invented" the iPad, iPod, or the iPhone. Even the original Macintosh was not purely his brainchild. However, it's easy to imagine a world without Steve as a world without any of those things. His broader influence is more difficult to measure. Many innovations have been attributed (sometimes accurately) to him: the Graphical User Interface. Good computer typography. The Personal Computer itself, as a really personal, usable thing. What would things have been like without his influence? If he hadn't built the NeXT computer, would Tim Berners-Lee have had a platform on which to invent HyperText and the World Wide Web? What would the Internet look like today if that hadn't happened when it did? Would the good guys have defeated the aliens in Independence Day if Dave didn't have a PowerBook? It is my guess that most of this stuff would have happened anyway, eventually. Progress is not one man. When people have needs, they solve them. Stuff gets done. People like Steve Jobs, though, are somehow ahead of the game. They know what we're going to need before we get there. They accelerate progress. That makes it sound like only really good marketing, which Apple certainly had nailed, but real innovation is more than convincing us we need to drink more soda and get fat. You can't argue that the stuff that came out of Apple didn't change the way we live, and not in a way that makes us fatter.
I think Steve Jobs had a different kind of influence on me though. I appreciate the ubiquity of smart phones, and the freedom normal people have to make movies at home. These are wonders of technology, but the person who was Steve Jobs was so much more than a great technological thinker, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about how the man's mind worked. This was a guy who got stuff done. If his interest had been transportation instead of personal computing, the kinds of vehicles we'd be using now won't be thought of for another 20 years. He seemed to transform the reality around him to fit what he thought it should be. The Reality Distortion Field actually worked in reality -- your reality. I don't think there is a name for that quality. Some have called it charisma, but I think it goes way beyond that. Maybe manic charisma or something. However you slice it, Steve Jobs was effective, in a way that I dream about being. He had a complicated personality, and I can't say that much of what he did personally I would find emulable. His ability to pull vision into reality, though, will always be inspiring.
Really influential people are all over in history. We read about them in books. They invented light bulbs. They advanced science and thought. They sat under apple trees. The things they did influenced the way we live our lives today. Usually, though, such figures of genius are just stories in books. They aren't even real. They may be written in history, their feats cataloged in textbooks, but how does that make them any more tangible than figures of Greek Mythos? Characters like this are not mere humans. Their feats are unattainable because they are made of different stuff than we are. They are immortal.
Jobs has already been compared to a number of these figures, and in some ways rightly so. What's unique about him, in my frame of reference, is that he was alive last week. I shared 27 solar revolutions with this creative genius, and am among the most immediate recipients of his passion and work. He wasn't in my textbooks growing up, he was on the news. I watched the things he did change the world radically before my eyes. I remember a time before Pixar, and have him, in part, to thank for some of the best movies I think have ever been made. It's a silly thing to say out loud, but Steve Jobs was mortal. Putting his accomplishments next to Newton and Galileo and Edison and the others reminds me that they were mortal too, and that is inspiring to me.
This is probably the question I most commonly ask myself when thinking about Apple and Jobs: what can I learn from him about being that effective? Is there an essence of "genius" in there somewhere that can be distilled and drank? The answer changes from time to time, and mostly revolves around hard work, but I'm grateful to have such historical figures to remind me that it's possible. Jobs is probably even more inspiring to me because he is so current.
It's no good to think of what might have been had he lived another 10 years, and to do so would be completely out of character with his philosophy of living. Still, it's sad to see him go so young, and a little depressing to think that he'll never again walk out on stage in his blue jeans to take forever to make a dramatic product announcement.
But, there are other geniuses out there. More people who will change the game in some way or another. More figures to be written into the history books. I imagine that somebody else will captivate our imagination and strike involuntary awe in our hearts. It won't do, though, so sit around and see who they are and what they come up with. They're not.
Steve Jobs was bold. He was inventive, influential, fearless, and effective. He was a man.
And so am I.
May he be remembered for the good he brought to the world, and in a way that inspires us to be so passionate about what we love. May his legacy for us be that we too can be among the crazy ones.
I have to admit that the sudden passing of Steve Jobs had more of an effect on me than I expected it would. While I have been what might be called an Apple Fanboy for a very long time now, I've really only owned about four Apple devices in my lifetime: my current MacBook Pro, the PowerMac G5 that Gemini bought, a 1st gen iPod Touch (2nd-hand), and an Apple //c I picked up at DI a few years back so I could remember the good ol' days. I've never met the guy, only seen him in video clips from the heady beginning days of the personal computer industry and at the more recent product launches. We have known for a while that he was ill, that he was going to die sooner than later, but even so, I was surprised at how sad I was to think that he'd actually gone.
Steve Jobs was an influential person. That much can not be argued. I take issue with the idea that he singlehandedly "invented" the iPad, iPod, or the iPhone. Even the original Macintosh was not purely his brainchild. However, it's easy to imagine a world without Steve as a world without any of those things. His broader influence is more difficult to measure. Many innovations have been attributed (sometimes accurately) to him: the Graphical User Interface. Good computer typography. The Personal Computer itself, as a really personal, usable thing. What would things have been like without his influence? If he hadn't built the NeXT computer, would Tim Berners-Lee have had a platform on which to invent HyperText and the World Wide Web? What would the Internet look like today if that hadn't happened when it did? Would the good guys have defeated the aliens in Independence Day if Dave didn't have a PowerBook? It is my guess that most of this stuff would have happened anyway, eventually. Progress is not one man. When people have needs, they solve them. Stuff gets done. People like Steve Jobs, though, are somehow ahead of the game. They know what we're going to need before we get there. They accelerate progress. That makes it sound like only really good marketing, which Apple certainly had nailed, but real innovation is more than convincing us we need to drink more soda and get fat. You can't argue that the stuff that came out of Apple didn't change the way we live, and not in a way that makes us fatter.
I think Steve Jobs had a different kind of influence on me though. I appreciate the ubiquity of smart phones, and the freedom normal people have to make movies at home. These are wonders of technology, but the person who was Steve Jobs was so much more than a great technological thinker, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about how the man's mind worked. This was a guy who got stuff done. If his interest had been transportation instead of personal computing, the kinds of vehicles we'd be using now won't be thought of for another 20 years. He seemed to transform the reality around him to fit what he thought it should be. The Reality Distortion Field actually worked in reality -- your reality. I don't think there is a name for that quality. Some have called it charisma, but I think it goes way beyond that. Maybe manic charisma or something. However you slice it, Steve Jobs was effective, in a way that I dream about being. He had a complicated personality, and I can't say that much of what he did personally I would find emulable. His ability to pull vision into reality, though, will always be inspiring.
Really influential people are all over in history. We read about them in books. They invented light bulbs. They advanced science and thought. They sat under apple trees. The things they did influenced the way we live our lives today. Usually, though, such figures of genius are just stories in books. They aren't even real. They may be written in history, their feats cataloged in textbooks, but how does that make them any more tangible than figures of Greek Mythos? Characters like this are not mere humans. Their feats are unattainable because they are made of different stuff than we are. They are immortal.
Jobs has already been compared to a number of these figures, and in some ways rightly so. What's unique about him, in my frame of reference, is that he was alive last week. I shared 27 solar revolutions with this creative genius, and am among the most immediate recipients of his passion and work. He wasn't in my textbooks growing up, he was on the news. I watched the things he did change the world radically before my eyes. I remember a time before Pixar, and have him, in part, to thank for some of the best movies I think have ever been made. It's a silly thing to say out loud, but Steve Jobs was mortal. Putting his accomplishments next to Newton and Galileo and Edison and the others reminds me that they were mortal too, and that is inspiring to me.
This is probably the question I most commonly ask myself when thinking about Apple and Jobs: what can I learn from him about being that effective? Is there an essence of "genius" in there somewhere that can be distilled and drank? The answer changes from time to time, and mostly revolves around hard work, but I'm grateful to have such historical figures to remind me that it's possible. Jobs is probably even more inspiring to me because he is so current.
It's no good to think of what might have been had he lived another 10 years, and to do so would be completely out of character with his philosophy of living. Still, it's sad to see him go so young, and a little depressing to think that he'll never again walk out on stage in his blue jeans to take forever to make a dramatic product announcement.
But, there are other geniuses out there. More people who will change the game in some way or another. More figures to be written into the history books. I imagine that somebody else will captivate our imagination and strike involuntary awe in our hearts. It won't do, though, so sit around and see who they are and what they come up with. They're not.
Steve Jobs was bold. He was inventive, influential, fearless, and effective. He was a man.
And so am I.
May he be remembered for the good he brought to the world, and in a way that inspires us to be so passionate about what we love. May his legacy for us be that we too can be among the crazy ones.
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