hey what's up

I just arrived in Utah. It's 3:30 am Mountain time, but I'm somewhere between Eastern and Central time, so... 5:00 am? I've been convincing myself that I'm not tired for the last 3 hours, and I think that plus a Mexican Coke have overperformed. I'm pretty well awake.

Also, I've got kind of a lot on my mind. This begins to explain why I'm posting right now.

I was really excited to come back to Utah. And I did get really excited when I crossed into Utah from Wyoming, not least of which because Wyoming has all of a sudden decided to enforce its speed limit, to the point that concerned citizens are calling the police on me when I speed past them. Seriously. (I got off with a warning).

But I'm feeling a little trepidation about living here. Substitute teaching really isn't that cool. Job hunting isn't that cool. These things are necessary for me right now. I wish I could just take trips, but that will quickly leave me without money. Money is necessary.

The thing I'm most excited for is music. I'm going to start performing. (By the way, I'm mixing a new Straight Up! ep. It's a bit of a stylistic detour, more in the vein of M83, Her Space Holiday, stuff you can't dance to. So yeah, I broke my own cardinal rule for Straight Up! and am making music you can't dance to. It was inevitable.) I want to go on tour. I want to get on a record label. I'm realizing that I'll never be completely satisfied with any other career; it will always just be a day job. So now's a good opportunity to try to make something happen. But also, I'm looking forward to playing with all the great people that I've played with in the past.

As for girls, I don't even know what to think. I know what I should think, which is that I should run away from any girl I'm attracted to and leave her well enough alone. But I won't. I'll continue to disguise my vanity as benevolence, and I'll leave you to figure out what that means.

You're not going to see much politics on this blog in the near future. I'm taking a hiatus from politics, unless I get hired by one of the few dozen political jobs that I've applied to over the last couple of weeks. What you will definitely read here is religion. I'm in the process of totally deconstructing Mormonism. After Prop 8 and learning more about the Priesthood Ban, I see arbitrary cultural traditions everywhere. I'm taking everything with a grain of salt. Yikes.

What I can say definitively about the Church: I realize my own way of thinking is flawed. I'm not asking for an acknowledgment of my superior thinking. I'm also not asking for others' flawed thinking to be exposed and ridiculed. What I would like is for the Church to be as forgiving of my flawed thinking as it is for the white middle-class conservative professionals'. Tall order? Hopefully not for too much longer.

Gen Con: a little discouraged by the Saturday sessions. Sunday morning, however, napalmed my spiritual face off. (In the good way)