The roses are dead.

Bob & Rose

I just started watching the weirdest show on GUBA—Bob & Rose. The premise is a little far fetched, though it is based on a true story, but the characters are so real that it almost hurts to watch them.

Proof that God Loves Us

Moons like ours are a cosmic rarity, says BBC News.

Men Stink

The Indian-Peruvian One's boyfriend has been at our apartment so long and so often watching Friends and Prison Break that the whole place is starting to smell like man.

Reading for Pleasure

We have talked of Joseph Sedley being as vain as a girl. Heaven help us! the girls have only to turn the tables, and say of one of their own sex, 'She is as vain as a man', and they will have perfect reason. The bearded creatures are quite as eager for praise, quite as finikin over their toilettes, quite as proud of their personal advantages, quite as conscious of their powers of fascination, as any coquette in the world.

—William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

Astrology Is True

This is from a piece about dating a Sagittarian woman:

In order for her to stay, you have to keep her happy. If she gets unhappy or bored, she won't bother to fix any problems, she will just walk out and never look back. Fortunately, it is not that difficult to keep her happy. Be her friend—she does not take love too seriously anyway. . . . Let her have her freedom, flirt with her and take the relationship slowly, do not rush her. . . .
Keep your emotional distance, and they will be attracted to you. Easy. . . . These are the easiest people to get a date with but don't think that this is written in stone; they are the biggest commitment phobe of all zodiac signs. Enjoy the time you've spent with Sagittarius and be prepared to move on or at least share them with others because they will be doing the same. All in good fun.

Sound like anyone we know?

Nostalgia

Today at the grocery store I heard a beautiful British man speaking to his wife. Then I came home, and the Australian guy in my ward had sent me an email:

It's going to be a tonne of fun!

I miss England!

Post 200: I-may-die-of-chocolate-poisoning Brownies

Passover friendly and gluten free!

Preheat oven to 300°F (150°C). Grease 8×8" (20×20 cm) pan with butter and rice-flour bottom.

Combine in a medium bowl:
4 eggs, beaten
1½ cups (335 g) white sugar
½ cup (85 g) brown sugar (use C&H or another real brown sugar)

Add:
1 cup (225 g) melted butter
1¼ cups (275 g) Hershey's Special Dark cocoa, or ¾ cup (175 g) dutched cocoa and ½ cup (100 g) regular cocoa
2 teaspoons (10 ml) vanilla
½ teaspoon (2.5 ml) sea salt or kosher salt
½ teaspoon (2.5 ml) xanthan gum
¼ cup (38 g) rice flour
¼ cup (38 g) potato starch

Pour into prepared pan. Bake for 40–45 minutes until center does not jiggle when you move the pan. Let cool completely on a wire rack before eating.

© Bethylene, 2007

Bad Ideas

• Pirates of the Caribbean sequels (but Mark Kermode's critique is priceless!)
  
• The impossible-to-use angled USB ports on mid-aughts Dell computers
• Building split-level apartments with one apartment's living room and kitchen above another apartment's bedrooms
• Grāpples
• Preemptive strikes (they don't work; see also Doctrine and Covenants 98:33–48)
• Breeding teacup dogs that are too small to maintain core body temperature and just shiver all the time
• Carbonated yogurt

Dear upstairs neighbors,

I hate you.

Complimenting my hair yesterday when you asked for our chairs for another one of your stupid parties did not make me like you.

You seem too stupid to realize that the raucous boys you invite over, feed, and entertain every single night are never going to ask you out. Why should they? You have created the perfect situation—you are the mommies, and they never have to grow up.

Didn't your mother ever tell you not to run in the house? Didn't she say that shouting indoors was rude? Doesn't it bother you at all that you're driving me crazy? Do you ever sleep? Don't you have to wake up at 06:30 or 07:00 sometimes?

Well, I do wake up at 06:30 or 07:00 every weekday morning, and when I haven't had enough sleep, I get cranky. I haven't slept eight hours since you moved in above me three months ago, and I am very, very cranky.

I hope you die, and then you go to hell where someone puts a metal bucket on your head and bangs on it. When you scream for them to stop, I hope they ask you to "come play with us then."

Bethylene

Divergence

This is it. Up until this last chapter, Cleave has paralleled Plead the entire way—Cleave is set at BYU while Plead took place in high school, and Cleave features Three Sisters rather than Plead's Much Ado about Nothing, but the plots and a lot of the dialog 'til now were nearly identical. I hope I can keep writing when I don't know where I'm going anymore.

If I have nothing else, I do, at least, have a title for the next chapter: ‘Crumbs of Happiness’. It's from one of Masha's lines in act 4 of Three Sisters.

Life Is Mean

I've heard lots of women say that going to a movie by themselves produced some of the most liberating feelings they've ever experienced. So tonight, even though I'm running a fever and my brain is melting out my nose, and even though my IC friends are going tomorrow during my date to see the Men's and Women's choruses (whoo.), I decided to go watch Volver at International Cinema.

My hair's getting really parched, so I slathered it in deep conditioner after taking a hot shower in an attempt to loosen aforementioned melted brain from my sinus cavities. I didn't wear makeup, and I put on a slouchy outfit from a couple days ago. In short, I looked hideous. I mean, my eyes are red and watery, my (always large) nose is even redder and chafing from all those Kleenexes, and I've got a huge zit on my chin that really stands out when my face is white and feverish. My hair, being full of conditioner, is clumpy, to put it mildly. You may think I'm exaggerating, but I'm really, really not: I can look ugly, and I definitely look very ugly right now. (Guys who say they're freaked out because a girl looks totally different without makeup are talking about me.) I could take a picture, but my camera's batteries are dead.

But none of this mattered, because I was going to the movie by myself, and movies are dark. That's when life decided to play one of it's cruel jokes. I should have seen it coming, especially since just last week I wrote, "The uglier you look, the more people whom you know will be dying to talk to you." Well, I got there before the lights went out, but I didn't want to linger outside because I'd just seen my reflection in one of the glass doors: Yuck. So there I am, sitting by myself, and who should decide to sit right in front of me but a contingent of people from my ward, including the man I almost tried to seduce with Operation Vixen?

I pretended to be asleep before the movie started, and luckily a woman I know from Middle East History to 1800 sat next to me, so I didn't look like a loner on top of looking like an adolescent boy with gender-identity issues. My seal-with-emphysema cough didn't help the low profile. I rushed out as soon as the credits came on, so I wouldn't have to talk to them. I doubt it worked, but I'm going to pretend that I looked so different from my normal self that they didn't recognize me.

On the way home, I saw a black H3 with extra-special cage accessories. Someone's feeling castrated!

As far as the movie's concerned, it was wonderful.

Sophistication

It's so exciting that I can make cornmeal mush (corn grits) and corn pone now and call it polenta.

Reza Aslan's Rare Common Sense

Reza Aslan, the brilliant and articulate author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, (which is the Kennedy Center book of the semester) spoke to a full house in the JSB auditorium this afternoon. As a well-read and well-accredited scholar of religion and sociology and also an Iranian-American (he actually said Iranian instead of Persian), he was very qualified to speak about Iranian-American relations in his lecture, "Revolution, Reformation, and Regime Change: Contemporary Iran."

It was fascinating. For instance, he recently visited Iran to do some research and visit some family. When she heard he lived in the United States, one woman asked, "What's it like to live in a theocracy?" So the misunderstanding goes both ways, as he says, "Iran is no more a theocracy than America is." However, since America has begin to threaten Iran, the clerical regime has grown stronger—in the name of national security, of course—and Iran has become paranoid. They think American missiles may rain down on them at any moment.

I'm not doing the lecture justice. I'll post a link to the video version when/if it's available. Basically, Mr Aslan's thesis was that, since thirty years of US sanctions against Iran have only strengthened the clerical regime, employing the China policy is the only way to break the regime. "Revolutions are undertaken by the middle class," he said. "No middle class, not revolution. No middle class, no democracy." Since Iran already has a democratic infrastructure, the transition to true democracy would be quick and relatively easy.

During the question and answer session, a man named Ben from my history and Arabic classes asked Mr Aslan why his book took such a "different approach towards Islam." Mr Aslan kindly explained that the moderate voice of Islam is not the minority, it is not even close to the minority. However, extremists make better TV, so they are featured frequently on American media. I was happy to be one of the ten people in the entire auditorium to raise their hands when he asked who had heard of the recent letter from a representative of every Islamic sect to the Pope and the Christian world. "If you are still looking for the moderate voice in Islam, and have not found it," he said, "you're not looking very hard." We are no longer spoonfed information by the media. We have the capacity to find out things for ourselves.

(So I don't want to attract from how brilliant Mr Aslan is, but I can't not mention how attractive he is: very.)

New Life

I pass an overgrown rose hedge every day on my way to campus. This July, the roses were pale and parched from the weeks and weeks of 110° weather. A few weeks ago, our first frost killed the last remaining flowers. Now, the hedge is covered in fresh, dark pink blossoms. I mean, anyone who knows anything about plants knows that these rose bushes shouldn't be producing anything; the bushes are completely neglected. Yet hundreds of delicate flowers bow to me as I walk to work, class, and church. I wish I showed so much grace under adversity.

Restaurant Review

One World Everybody Eats at 41 South 300 East in Salt Lake City delights both the gastronomic and the altruistic senses. The fresh, organic menu (with vegan, vegetarian, and meat options) changes daily. Also, customers choose their own portion sizes and their own prices, so they never feel like they are wasting food. Customers can also volunteer an hour of work for a meal if they cannot pay. The staff are friendly, and they know their stuff.

When I visited this neohippie delight, I chose from among the free appetizers quinoa and vegan miso soup. This was followed by some beautiful mixed greens, a delicious and filling lettuce-free salad, some oil-based coleslaw, and stuffed acorn squash. (I had the plain squash, but my companions loved the stuffed squash.) For dessert, they offered delicious pumpkin pie, made the way my family makes it—from the pumpkin up. Everything was delicious, and the southeast-Asian/contemporary-art décor is fun, especially since we could seat ourselves. I felt like I had finally eaten my five-a-day.

Their mission—that everybody eats—is wonderful, and they have wonderful food to back it up. I highly recommend this café.