Long Post Alert

Every now and again, some movie, book, song, or television show will come out dealing with what are known as the “Seven Deadly Sins”. As Mormons we don’t know much about this topic because…well…it’s just not scriptural. It’s more of a Catholic tradition than actual doctrine and it has origins dating back to 4th century monks. Don’t get me wrong greed, sloth, pride, envy, etc. are all deadly sins, there is no doubt about that, but so are lying, cheating, bearing false witness, swearing, watching bad movies, and thinking the Asian girl from Grey’s Anatomy is good looking. There are also spin-offs of the Seven Deadly Sins too like “the seven heavenly virtues”, the “seven deadly sins of business”, “The Seven Deadly Heresies”, and the seven worst movies derived from video games. Okay I made that last one up but seriously how hilariously sucky were Mario Bros. the movie (John Leguizamo didn’t even have a stache…nice Luigi!), Street Fighter the movie, Double dragon (okay I loved this movie as kid almost as much as 3 Ninjas), and Laura Croft Tomb Raider (although we all know this movie does have at least one redeeming quality.)

For my own spin-off I want to share with you all what I like to call the seven random things that have been on my mind lately:

(To start, here are just two.)
1) A few of years ago I went with a couple of brother-in-laws to Tucson to watch BYU football play the University of Arizona. As we drove through downtown, I started to notice the amount of bars and clubs lining the street. From the outside it was obvious that the majority of the patrons were college students. It occurred to me that college campuses tend to attract a certain amount of industry to the cities they are in. As students tend to be a large target market for these cities, bars and clubs are apt to accumulate nearby. Provo has this same dynamic. Only rather than attracting bars and clubs we attract call-centers and movie theaters. Mathematically it should not make sense. At my last count there were 30,000 students living in Provo and 31,000 call centers (we are tied for first with Bangalor and Mumbai). I believe there are also 343 movie theaters within a 16 block radius of Center Street and University Ave (all of which have played non-stop showings of “New Moon” to completely sold out crowds since early Friday Morning.) Am I taking crazy pills or has somebody else noticed this?

2) An article caught my attention the other day called “The Evolution of Cell Phones”. It talked about the old phones that came in a backpack with a squiggly pig tail cord, the Zack Morris, The classic Nokia that had the best cell phone game known to man (Snake), all the way up to the I-phone. If I had written that article it would have contained a heck of a lot more than just the technological advances that have taken place with cell phones. It would talk about the irony that with each new advance in cellular technology, our ability to communicate with one another has severely diminished. When we were kids and we wanted to get a hold of our friends we had to call their house. Not only that, we had the gate keeper system known as Mom and Dad. So we learned to talk to our friends parents. At least as far as to say “is Morgan home? Do you know where he went? Who was he with? Do you know where they were going?” (that last part is much funnier if it is read in a high-pitched pre-pubescent tone). Now-a-days teenagers can’t even figure out how to talk to each other much less their friends parents. I see kids hanging out with their girlfriends and not say a single word to them all night long, and then the second they get in the car after the date they start texting each other until their fingers fall off.

History in the Making...And it Doesn't Look like the Good Kind

I consider myself to be a pretty easy-going guy, there are very few things in this world that I just can’t stand. There are a few things, however, that tend to get under my skin. We all have pet peeves and little things here and there that annoy us from time to time. This particular post is not about one of those little “pet peeves”. I had a friend that woke up one day with a buzzing in his ear and after several hours he started to have nightmares that it would never go away. To make a long story short, it never has…he just an incessant, annoying buzz at the back of his ear that’s ruining his life. Well, that is the kind of thing I am talking about in this post.

I hate registering my car. Vehicle registration has to be one the most heinous punishments ever devised for inflicting torment on human beings. I do understand why we do it, and truthfully it is not the registration, “per se,” that I despise so much; it is the registration process that is so painfully unbearable. Consequently, my wife’s car has been expired for over three months now. (I hope blog posts are not a way for people to implicate themselves…apologies to my wife in advance if our car gets impounded as a result of this post.)

I personally guarantee it would be more difficult to find a person in this city who has not had a miserable experience at the DMV, than it was for Abraham to find a righteous person in all of Sodom and Gomorrah. This place is swarming with incompetence; it is almost comical watching them “work” behind the counter. Remarkably, the wait time is in no way related to how many people are actually in line. Parkinson’s Law dictates that it be that way, as the civil servant behind the counter will expand his work so as to fill the time available for its completion.

I suppose it has become my modus operandi to apologize for offensiveness in the middle of every one of my posts. This post might be the most offensive so far, so I truly am sorry to anyone that works at the DMV. The only reason I even bring up my concerns is that Obama’s health care reform bill passed through the House of Representatives late last night. Have we really learned nothing from our current experience with “public options”? We can’t even register our automobiles without pulling our teeth out. Do we really want these people behind the counter when we’re bleeding to death?

Some Signs of the Times I Suppose

I just got done watching my Yankees clobber the Phillies in the 9th and I am totally exhausted so this post might be a little shorter. It’s actually not even very late, but with day light savings switching back last night it feels like it’s two in the morning. Oh sorry, for those of my readers in Arizona, daylight savings is something we do in America…get with the program or we’re gonna give you back to Mexico!

Has anybody noticed how sad trick-or-treating has become? Nobody even goes anymore. It could just be that I live in Orem where the population has continued to get older from the moment I graduated high school. I swear I must have been the last graduating class in this city; what happened to all the kids?

The saddest thing about Halloween (sorry again Arizona…Dia de Los Muertos), however, is not the number of kids out trick-or-treating, it is that nobody can go out alone anymore. It amazes me how much society has changed in the last ten or so years; if kids are away from their parents for more than four minutes there is a global crisis and Amber Alerts are sent halfway across the Universe. When I was a kid, I would disappear into the orchard with my friends and not come back until dinner time the following day and nobody would miss me. Okay so that was a little exaggerated but you get the point.

It’s not that I think parents have gotten more paranoid, although that does have a little to do with it. I am not sure where they came from or how it happened, but there truly are more deadbeats, drug dealers, sexual predators, junkies, mouth-breathers, bottom feeders, misfits, gang bangers, ciphers, hobos, goths, cutters, pedophiles, two-bit hussies, and “O’Doyles” in the world than there used to be. By the time my kids are old enough to trick-or-treat I am probably going to need a concealed weapons permit to take my kids to “trunk-or-treat” in the church parking lot. Am I alone here or have things truly gotten worse since we were all kids?

Sometime between today and my next post, which I am thinking will be about how all moms who decide to go back to school somehow think wheelie backpack are in style, we need to come up with a plan to go back to the way things used to be…no I don’t mean we should all start renting Gremlins on VHS from Albertson’s every weekend. I just want my kids to have some of the same fun experiences I had, like a paper route, without me having to call in the live 5 viper to run chopper surveilance over the area.