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Well… I hesitate to say that I tentatively think that I might have possibly decided to stop bothering with writing comments in response to letters to the editor in the Salt Lake Tribune . “Oh!” (I hear you say.) “I didn’t even know you were writing comments in the  Salt Lake Tribune .” Well, yes, I was. And sometimes lots of comments. But after taking a bit of a break over the past couple of weeks, I went back the other day, posted a couple of things and decided that I really wasn’t enjoying it. For one thing, the same old crowd is there (as one might expect). The waves of conservatives vs. the waves of liberals. Both camps have a couple of articulate writers. Given my own political sensibilities, I have found the points of view expressed by the conservative camp — especially the articulate ones — to be singularly misinformed, reliant on very questionable sources. Some people on both sides of the political divide are inarticulate, semi-literate, frequently rude, and sometimes just ...

This morning we brought the trappings of an “American breakfast” up to Jim and Claudia’s — a Dutch/German couple who speak English to one another, and who have bought a condo in an old farm complex up on the Plateau de Valensole above Quinson. Claudia’s parents are visiting until Tuesday from Greater Frankfurt, and it was somewhat at the instigation of Claudia’s dad that this event transpired. (He’d mentioned in the course of our going with them for an impromptu drink at the local bar the other night that he and the missus loved, loved, loved American breakfasts, especially the breakfast buffets with all the bacon and eggs, etc. I/we offered to make them an American breakfast; however, given the fact that our tiny eat-in kitchen could not possibly accommodate seven adults, we prepared everything and took it up to J&C’s gracious and spacious place.) Despite his fears that they would not turn out well and thus embarrass him, Mr Mo made pancakes and they were delicious as ever. We als...

Okay, I know the answer to this one, especially after having spent part of today wallowing in a sea of receipts, museum and movie tickets, birthday and anniversary cards, brochures, maps, photos, and other potential/real memorabilia. Not to mention Papers That Must Be Kept for tax purposes for a minimum of seven or ten years or whatever the current French or American statute requires. (In reality, of course, such papers may abide with me eternally.) I have a respectable box full of papers that will go to the recycling bin tomorrow. But the box barely makes a dent, as certain Family Detractors will no doubt point out with a mix of glee and exasperation. Andy Warhol kept a lot of papers as well, with each year’s worth of invitations and programs and suchlike deposited into its very own large drawer. It is the stuff of dreams from a researcher’s point of view, or at least a biographer’s, I suppose. I don’t know if Warhol’s collection includes anything quite so pedestrian as receipts from ...

…And I only found out about it this past Monday, November 2nd, after our letter carrier came by with the mail.  When I saw the three envelopes from the French Ministry of the Interior (one addressed to me, one to Mr Mo, and the third to Youngest), I have to say that I steeled myself against a refusal: surely we were being informed that, sorry, there was something wrong with the (mountains of) papers you submitted, so you can’t become French, try again. Mr Mo heard my whoops and hollers as I tore open my envelope and saw these words: J’ai le plaisir de vous faire savoir que vous êtes Française depuis le 22 octobre 2009. — It is my pleasure to inform you that as of October 22, 2009, you are a French citizen. Mr Mo guessed what had produced my unusual cries even before I got up the stairs with the letters. Well then, hot damn — dual nationality. The news reduced our Youngest to tears of joy and more than one skype-based panegyric (if such a thing can be thus described). And I, too, h...

It seems odd to be writing a little something about Chiune Sugihara while working here in Germany, and about whom I just learned in reading the second of the two Hark! A Vagrant!comics on this page . “Japan’s Schindler” went unnoticed and unsung back in his native Japan, after having risked his career (and possibly his life) to save anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 Jews by granting them transit visas as a vice-consul in Lithuania. Had I known to look for the monument in his honor in Vilnius, and the other one in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, I would have done so. Sugihara puts me in mind of Hamburg’s golden paving stones ( Stolperstein ), sprinkled here and there in the sidewalks (usually in front of apartment buildings), and inscribed with the names and fates of the deported Jews who had lived in those places. Some apartment buildings were torn down, of course, and stores and markets put up in the spaces, but the paving stones remain, seemingly unnoticed by the hundreds of customers and ...

(Pardon my instinctive response to this post’s title; it is heartfelt: Ah hahahahahaha, ha! ha! ho! ho! Heeeeeeee! ) I just now finished a kind of second breakfast with Gisela and Gerald. As I have written elsewhere, my German is pathetic. Gisela’s English is slightly better than my German, Gerald’s English is much better than my German, but not fluent by a long stretch. So having a conversation is challenging, but do-able. They always seem fascinated by the bizarrities and (quite honestly) outright horrors of some of America’s ways, especially in terms of health care and workers’ rights and all. The fact that a long-time American employee can show up at work and find him/herself fired, entitled only to two weeks’ pay, and often escorted to their desk, supervised as they pack up their belongings, and escorted out — without even so much as the chance to say a proper goodbye to one’s coworkers — astounds them.  They worry that the German safety net, as with the French, is being slowl...

(Written in transit from Walldorf, Germany, to Marseille, France, on January 15th) The catastrophe in Haiti saddens and appalls me — I am saddened for the loss of life, for the unfathomable sorrow of the survivors, the pain of the injured, for the fact that the survivors have lost so many and so much. Some have lost their entire families in addition to escaping with only what they were wearing at the time the earthquake struck.  I am appalled because much of the loss of life was preventable. Hmm. That may be hyperbole borne of wishful thinking: preventing the deaths in Haiti would have meant years of fixing so many systemic problems as to render “prevention” meaningless: replacing, for example, the shantytowns with affordable, built-to-code structures; providing meaningful employment; benefitting from competence rather than corruption at all levels of government, and so on infinitum ad nauseam . The photos tell the story: there doesn’t seem to be one building anywhere in Port-au-Pr...

When I'm on facebook these days — and I’m on much more than I should be — I hang out a bit on the Feminist Mormon Housewives page… with occasional forays onto The Mormon Hub and Mormon Liberals pages, too. (Yeah, fine, I’m still a junkie that way.) Unsurprisingly, I come across quite a few people who are grappling with their faith, trying to reconcile all of the same kinds of things that Mr Mo and I tried for years to reconcile about the church and logic and morality and all… until we finally couldn’t stand the cognitive dissonance anymore and stopped going. We are nonetheless still Members of Record.† But just before Christmas, while I was whiling away the time on facebook, a message window popped up from a dear old friend of mine from Pittsburgh days, and lo! She wanted me to read her letter of resignation — having decided that as of 2014, she was not going to be mormon anymore. Though I was a little surprised at the “out of the blue”-ness of the experience, I wasn’t particularly...

Well, OK, yes, of course I do, but I know only the American system of solfège. (And how is it that I only just discovered that this word is the same in English as it is in French?) It is embarrassing, occasionally humiliating, not to automatically know what note “ré bémoule” is, for example. I end up comparing the do-re-mi vs. ABC scales in my mind, much as innumerate people count on their fingers to calculate. Even with that, I am sometimes wrong (and laugh it off though I may in public, it’s excruciating to me inside). And then I see terms such as “fixed-do” and “movable-do”… and am filled with dread and fear that this will all be too hard and complicated to learn — at least on my own. — Indeed, it was the fear of being continually embarrassed by my ignorance that greatly contributed to my not having joined any choirs since moving to Europe in late 2001… until this past year in Grenoble, when the need to find some kind of non-work social outlet to keep from going crazy with loneline...

Three hundred thousand people across nine counties in near Charleston, West Virginia including Charleston itself, are without water due to chemical contamination of the water supply (the Elk River) . From a practical and logistical standpoint, the biggest problem is that this contamination is such that even boiling the water won’t do any good. All it can be used for is flushing toilets — not drinking, not showering, not laundry.  FEMA has trucked in 1 million liters of H2O so far… not even a gallon per person affected. This problem is bigger than what all but the most food-storage-conscious family might be able to handle (on a short-term basis). To me, the worst part of the whole mess is that the coal-processing chemical company where the leak originated didn’t even bother to notify WVa’s water authority… it was discovered after the authority fielded complaints from people downstream. Unknown how long the leak’s been happening and how many people (including unborn children) this m...

In my post Coming or Going? (Mormons as Ugly Americans, etc.) , I said that the Mormon church had already done things in the political arena (to say nothing of things in other arenas) that to my mind have fully merited my resigning… were it not for my decision to wait until my parents have departed from this mortal realm. (Note poetic euphemism. We do like our euphemisms! — But I digress.) One such set of actions and policies has to do with gay marriage. This past month has been a humdinger: a federal judge ruled that Utah’s Amendment 3 to its state constitution — which categorically defines marriage as consisting of a man and a woman (ironic indeed for the former? polygamy capital of the western world) — was unconstitutional. About 1,300 gay couples went and got married, some more easily than others (I’m frankly surprised that there wasn't even more ass-holiness among the county clerks, quite honestly, but shame on those deceitful few!). Utah asked for a stay, which was ultimately...

It has been just over a year since my last blog post, and… what a year it has been. As 2014 truly qualified as a turbulent “Z Cam” year , I’m not sure in which stellar category I could possibly place 2015 — perhaps a series of Type II supernovae? The short (!) story is that I suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder while in Grenoble, brought on by a number of factors, including the resumption of choral singing and meeting someone who reminded me a lot of my late friend Barbara . That person became very important to me. Unfortunately, the PTSD had the effect of my becoming largely the same person I was 40 years ago — a teenager, with all of the same kinds of obsessive behavior and hyper-perfectionism and so on that the passage of time had tamped down (at least to some degree). I was able to be “myself” again during those too-brief intervals when I was able to go home to Berlin (and sometimes to Quinson, but mostly whenever and wherever Mr Mo was)… and then I’d relapse shortly after...

I’ve been decoding and transferring various jots and tittles that I wrote down on a small stack of 3x5 cards during my mission, mostly while I was at the Language Training Mission (LTM; this turned into the MTC — Missionary Training Center — in the fall of 1978, when I was serving in northeastern France). Anyway, one can well imagine that most of my notes were of the various LTM sacrament meeting talks, Sunday School or Relief Society lessons, or of LTM or BYU devotionals and firesides featuring various general authorities at the time. Most of these notes are in everyday English… but some are written using the phonetic Deseret alphabet . I used the Deseret alphabet whenever I interjected a personal observation, indulged in (hyper-)religious breast-beating about my sins (both real and imagined or at least exaggerated in the rarified atmosphere of the LTM)… and when I was angry or upset or puzzled about something or someone (as illustrated in a [previous blog post)|/post/2014/01/05/Well%...

Riffing off of this story in the Deseret News about sister missionaries surviving Typhoon Haiyan : My most dangerous mission moment (apart from LTM stuff†) happened in Metz, France, during January 1978. It was P-day (preparation day — essentially our day off, when we would go to the laundromat and grocery shopping and such); Sister Blue and I had gone to Auchan, a big “hypermarché” a fair ways from our apartment in Borny, but still walkable. At least a good foot of snow was on the ground; I don’t remember if the buses were running or not, but even if they were, we decided to walk back to the apartment with our groceries. It was damned cold — quite possibly the coldest day of the coldest winter in my lifetime to that point. About half-way to our apartment, I remember coming to the harebrained conclusion that it might be fun to freak out Sister B (an ER nurse) by pretending to be suffering from hypothermia, so I sat down in the snow. But apparently I wasn’t really pretending. She got me...

I am the founder and administrator of a facebook group for missionaries who served under the same mission president Mr Mo and I did back in the day. President & Sister A were lovely people, and I was always glad to have the chance to stop and visit them on those rare occasions when I would be in Salt Lake City. Sentimental soul that I am, I have also founded other mormon church-related FB groups as well… but not because I’m still a believer. (I’m mostly interested in gleaning photos and stories from back in the day.)  Anyway, last night a relative newbie to the missionary alumni group posted this question: “So 30+ years on, I’m wondering how many of you guys are still practicing LDS?” Uh-oh, thinks I, here is a loaded question, and right off the bat, I correctly guessed that the asker, we’ll call him Guy, was no longer a practicing member himself (actually, no longer a member at all, but I’m getting ahead of myself a bit). Various people responded, most of whom are still active...

Last year Mr Mo and I went to “Gallery Weekend Berlin” on the last weekend in April. We ended up visiting quite a few galleries in several different locations around central Berlin (“Mitte”) — many in repurposed factories. (I think I took a fair number of photos, but it seems that they were among those that didn’t get backed up before my laptop was stolen, alas. I will have to ask Mr Mo if he took some.) Anyway, what prompts this little entry is the explanatory sheet that we were given about a particular artist’s work, which also came with another sheet showing thumbnails and the dimensions of the paintings on display. Gosh. About the best I can say is that I didn’t despise Michael Williams’ “This Means Something to My Horse” exhibit as much as I totally hate most of Cy Twombly’s stuff, but it was a clear runner-up.† Here is the amazingly creative, best-face-on-it description of his work:  Michael Williams paints the uncanny, with a tendency toward the outright ludicrous.  (‘L...

I was stuck with my France-based colleagues in yet another god-awful boring horrible useless netmeeting with people across the Atlantic at the end of our work day here today. It’s probably because I was (am) so desperately tired from sleeping so poorly for so many nights in succession that I’ve lost track of how many, but I was very wicked. After setting the stage for an emergency escape by saying that there were thunderstorms in the area (true, but my characterizing them as “severe” was a bit hyperbolic, I’ll admit), I went ahead and found a youtube video of a thunderstorm and jacked up my laptop speaker to the max after quietly sampling where the best crash-and-boom was. (Thank God for mute buttons on our phone consoles, given the French-side reactions to these antics.) The overseas colleagues were convinced. The next step was to have been playing another youtube clip that I’d found, this time of a fire alarm (which would be attributed to a short circuit caused by a lightning strike,...

Well, I guess it’s official: today I found myself rehearsing in my pathetic, limited German, the line “Ich lebe in Berlin” — “I live (or I am living) in Berlin,” instead of what I had been saying up till now — “Ich lebe in Frankreich, aber mein Mann muss in Berlin arbeiten diese Jahr und nächste Jahr” (the likely grammatically incorrect way to say “I live in France, but my husband must work here this year and next year”— leaving the “so I must live here, too” up to the listener to fill in).  Breathe here. This all must mean that I am getting used to the idea of really and truly living in Germany, despite the fact that it may be too complicated to do so officially. But living here is hard. The language is hard (and no, not all Germans speak English, at least not here in Berlin!), but I think making friends is always the hardest aspect of any move. This said, I/we have made a little progress on that front, including getting to know the previous tenants of our current apartment a bit ...

My principal Facebook Mormon hangout group these days is Feminist Mormon Housewives, and scarcely a day goes by when someone, and often more than one person, relates how she was abused — physically or sexually or emotionally or all at once, or… or… and often by a family member, often by a parent, sometimes by a spouse. It was the same during Midwest Pilgrims and Exponent II retreats: so many women told of their suffering betrayal and hurt and grief and violence. Being LDS doesn’t seem to prevent abuse: it seems to happen among the saints at the same rate as elsewhere (and in fact, authoritarian groups such as LDS, Inc. and evangelical churches have a somewhat higher rate of abuse than other populations). I found it all mind-boggling when I first started hearing women’s stories. While I guess I’ve come to expect such revelations when such topics are raised, the number of women who have lived through awful childhoods still astonishes me. —And makes me grateful that I had such a normal ch...