I'm over renting.

Don't you love gifts? I dropped by my apartment on my way through Manchester to make sure everything was in shape and everyone was all moved out. When I went in, I found that my thoughtful subletters had left me some surprise presents!

They included: A completely trashed house, cat poop in the bedroom, and rotting food in the refrigerator.

Obviously I don't have a lot of use for these things, but it's the thought that counts, and it was sweet. My landlord doesn't think so, though. Luckily, I gave him his gift early.

My deposit.

In which I lead the charge

Spurred, no doubt, by my blog entry on the subject in June, Attorneys General and the FTC are pushing for regulations for fake blogs and sponsored blog entries that advertise products.

What's life without a little risk?

When I was little, my best friend Jacob and I divided our "games" into two styles, which we termed "As We're The Guys" and "As They're The Guys."

In the former, we would take on pretend roles for ourselves. We would become explorers in Jurassic Park, the command crew of the fictional USS Merteer in Star Trek, or (in one of our most creative developments) two avatars trapped in a virtual video game world, where the rules were about as well-developed as those of CalvinBall. (We once actually tried to play CalvinBall; this resulted in much resentment, and probably a fist fight.)

The latter style involved the use of Action Figures, usually either Lego or Star Trek. We would take turns choosing which characters we would control and represent, as if picking Kickball teams, and would work together to construct an exciting story. I also once referred to video games--an element conspicuously absent from my childhood, and conspicuously present in my adolescence and (pseudo) adulthood--as falling in to the "As They're The Guys" category. Since even girls had me beat in ownership of Sega and Nintendo products, I would always want to play video games at my friends' houses, and they would always want to do something else.

It should be obvious that our adventures As We're The Guys carried significantly more physical risk than our games As They're The Guys, whether from falling out of trees or from good-natured play turning into a brawl. Jacob's dad was particularly furious when he caught us playing "Cowboy Shootout" in the garage by throwing actual live bullets at each other. "Those could have exploded!" he shouted, and for the next several hours I had a mental image of their garage erupting in a giant fireball.

Though we may have risked more broken limbs in our exploits As We're The Guys, it was while playing with action figures that we put our eternal souls on the line. As we oversaw an episode of Star Trek As They're The Guys, the Enterprise (since our action figures were Picard, Riker, et al., they crewed the Enterprise, not the Merteer) was boarded by a band of particularly dangerous pirate-like villains. Some character--I forget who--said something like "Oh God," or "Thank God," to which the boss villain responded, "We don't believe in God. We believe in Satan." Yes, as atheism, Moral Therapeutic Deism, and plain hypocrisy were foreign concepts to us, it made perfect sense that good people followed God, and bad people followed Satan.

As someone who would go on to be a writer, actor, and habitual devil's advocate, I had no complaint with this expression of a "bad" viewpoint. Jacob, however, immediately stopped the game and, speaking aloud, reassured God, "We don't believe that, we're just talking for the bad guys in the game."

"God knows," I told him.

Canadian, Please

religion

Grasping at ribbons, she considers at the worst possible time the exact formulations of gerund phrases, forgetting for a critical moment that her primary drive should be her own salvation, not that it was likely anyway. Hurled from safety into the ventilation shaft and finding it filled with the grey and golden streamers, she knows even as she passes the event horizon and out of reach that they never would have held her weight in the first place, and so she prays. She prays that her prayer all those years ago was something she meant and not something she meant to mean, and that she will fall through the floor and onto the other side and find that death can't stop her. Or that a giant turbine at the bottom will turn on and carry her up through the glittering ribbons and back to where she started, so she can mean to mean things all over again until she falls back into the shaft.

Thoughts on Brethren and homosexuality

I scribbled up a post on Feetwashing and Four Square about why homosexuality very much is something we should be focusing our energy on in the Church. Check it out.

Also, if you're young and Brethren, puh-leeze talk to me about contributing...