Lifestyle

This afternoon I was eating lunch outside the library with some friends from the English department, watching the reconstruction of the Wilk. There were three of us, all seniors graduating next month, not a single one of us with a clear idea of what to do with a BA in English. "I should have done the English Education degree," I said. "At least then I could teach."

"Blech," said Jose, who meets the hipster-poet stereotype better than any of us, with his dark-framed glasses, tight jeans and t-shirt, and hair as long as BYU will let him grow it. "English Education is so..."

"Practical?" I offered.

Faith, a girl who has been in several of my classes over the years, including this semester's creative writing class where I workshopped my essay about being a mutant, chuckled. "If we were practical people, we would major in computer science." She brushed aside a tuft of long, brown hair that had blown in her face. "But you couldn't teach high school anyway, could you, Ben?"

"Huh?"

She sat up. "Because of your... lifestyle. I mean, I know you're a good person, but if I had a kid and one of the teachers at my kid's school was... like you, I'd be concerned."

I stared at her, feeling like I'd been punched in the gut. Jose stopped mid-bite and gawked at her.

"Don't get me wrong," Faith said, "you're my friend and I know you would never..." She vaguely gestured toward the destroyed Wilkinson Center. "But people are understandably careful about who they expose their kids to."

Jose looked at his lap and continued eating his sandwich. I looked to the Wilk, trying to wrap my head around what exactly Faith was saying. That mutants shouldn't be high school teachers because they might blow up the school? You know, despite the fact that most of us don't have blowing-up powers? Or that by exposing children to us, they might learn to blow up schools? And lifestyle? Really? What kind of lifestyle do I have? I go to BYU. I do homework. I hang out with my girlfriend. I hate that word. Lifestyle.

"Hey," Faith said, breaking the awkward silence. "We're cool, right? I mean, I'm just trying to be honest."

I nodded. I was too paralyzed by shock to do anything else. I should probably be angry now, but more than anything I just feel depressed. Faith isn't a bigot. She doesn't hate me. She wasn't trying to be mean or hurtful. Faith is an intelligent, kind person. She's my friend. She's a good person. The depressing thing is that I live in a world where it's the good people who say things like that.

Workshop Part Deux

Well that was... interesting. As promised, I workshopped my essay about being a Mormon mutant in my BYU creative writing class today. The results were varied: The majority of classmates just gave me feedback on the writing itself (which is, you know, the point of the workshop). Several gave me kudos for being so bold and open. A couple mentioned that they have mutant family members or friends. One girl who last semester workshopped a personal essay about her horrible experience dating a guy who only told her he was a mutant once they were talking about marriage (she promptly dumped him) unsurprisingly found all kinds of things to criticize in my essay--ranging from run-on sentences to pronouns with unclear referents to my apparent lack of empathy for non-mutants (and she also doesn't like my overuse of parentheticals).

The most... interesting reaction came from a girl I'll call Suzie. Suzie is a recently-returned missionary with long brown hair that she wears down and slightly frizzy. She has thick glasses and a judgmental smirk that comes out whenever someone mentions anything even remotely liberal or otherwise non-conforming, which I'm not sure she's even aware of. I suspect she's secretly attractive, but she hides it under baggy jeans and long-sleeve plaid shirts that she buttons all the way to her chin--you know, lest she cause a guy to have inappropriate thoughts. Here's an excerpt from the very long comment she left at the end of my essay:

Everyone has temptations, but you don't see normal people going around and flaunting their weaknesses. A married man who talked openly about his attraction to female coworker would just be inviting sin. A former smoker who keeps a pack of cigarettes in his pocket is asking for a relapse. There's a reason paedophiles don't get callings in the Primary. You talk about your challenge as if it's something to be proud of, even to the point of confessing past transgressions. The Lord doesn't want us to be proud of our weaknesses; He wants us to be humble enough to let Him take them from us. 

Yes, she used the British spelling of pedophile. No, she's not British. Just pretentious. I've kept her British spelling and introduced her with that description of a self-righteous Molly Mormon because I think she's kind of ridiculous and I want you to agree with me. But at the same time, her criticism has really upset me, and typically that only happens when there's at least a grain of truth to the criticism. I already know I'm driving a little close to the edge by openly claiming a mutant identity and hanging out with mutants and mutant supporters. It's a risk I'm willing to take in order to open up discussion about what it means to be a Mormon mutant. But the part I'm not so happy to admit is that I am proud of being a mutant. I'm not sure when that happened--it wasn't true four months ago, but it is now. And I think she's right, I probably shouldn't be proud. I should be humble. I should be humbly asking the Lord to take this from me.

But honestly? I don't want to.

Workshop

Remember when I was thinking of bringing my essay about being a Mormon mutant to my creative writing class at BYU? That plan was put on hold as I worked through anxiety about airing my dirty laundry in public, and then my life exploded and I completely forgot about the essay. Until this morning, that is.

At our weekly meeting of FOX, Tara asked whether I'd ever had the essay workshopped in a creative writing class. I said no, and Galadriel called me a wimp. Even Chenry, who had once expressed reservations about the whole thing, was encouraging me to do it. "You might as well," Tara said, "now that you're using your real name on your blog." It's a valid point, but I doubt any of my classmates read the blog.

As it happens, my turn to be workshopped is this Thursday. I already had a short story up on Google Drive, ready to share with the class, but I can always use that next time. So just now I made a few revisions to my essay, uploaded it, and shared it with everyone in my class.

*Deep breath.*

I'll let you know how the workshop goes on Thursday.

Me, Literarily

I ran into an old friend this morning at another friend's piano recital. This is someone I've known for almost fourteen years now, who's read a lot of my writing, from the really crappy stuff I wrote in high school to the not-quite-so-crappy stuff I've written in college. She mentioned a book she'd recently read about blogging, then added with a smile, "I thought you might be interested in, you know, people who write secret blogs and stuff." I laughed and asked how she knew--whether it was some detail of my life that I'd mentioned. She said it wasn't so much the details as the writing style. My voice, I guess. It was nice to chat with her, and reassuring to hear from someone who knows me so well that she recognized me from the way I write. I suppose my fear is that in accepting my mutant identity, I am becoming a different person, so I'll gladly accept evidence that I am fundamentally still the same me.

My friend also told me that she had seen my blog linked from a review of Mormon literature at the AML blog. The snooty English major in me wants to say, "Excuse me, sir, I know literature, and this blog is no literature," but the rest of me is just flattered to have people noticing me. I guess now I'll have to be more, like, literary and stuff.

Are you impressed by my mad Photoshop skillz?

Dirty Laundry

Got an email from Chenry today. He apologized for missing our writing group meeting the other day, especially since he knows I could easily read more into his absence than he intended. He says he just had to work late at his overnight warehouse stocking job (this is what I have to look forward to as an English major). He admits he was surprised to read my essay about being a Mormon mutant, and says his first reaction was to think of General Conference talks about not airing one's dirty laundry in public. After reading my essay and thinking about it for a couple of days, though, he says he understands why I want to go public, and he recognizes that talking about being a mutant--which isn't a sin in and of itself--isn't the same as talking about past transgressions.

I'm relieved that he doesn't seem weirded out by the whole thing and that he's obviously trying to understand things from my perspective and to help. I'm also worried that his initial reaction might have been right. Between this blog and the essay and UUPP, am I being a little too careless about the private details of my life I share with anyone who wants to listen? No, being a mutant isn't a sin, but I have talked here about a couple of times I slipped up and did things I shouldn't have. Will people judge all mutants by my imperfections? Am I getting as close to the edge as I can without jumping, rather than keeping a safe distance? I mean, if I were a porn addict, would it be wise of me to run around telling everyone about how much I want to look at porn, and talk about the websites I'm not going to?

Why can't anything be simple?

What Does The Fox Say?

You may not guess it from the crap I spew forth on this blog, but I'm actually an aspiring author. I've taken just about every creative writing course in the English department, I'm applying to BYU's creative writing MFA program, and I'm part of a writing critique group. It's a small group--just me, a married guy who graduated last year (let's call him Chenry), a girl I worked with at the CougarEat my freshman year (Galadriel), and a woman I met at a writers' conference who works in the Wilk (Tara). For the sake of preserving my anonymity (which I'm starting to question, as you'll see below), I'll call this group FOX: Friends Of X. We meet on Tuesday mornings at Tara's office in the Wilk.

Photo credit: http://www.state.nj.us/dep/fgw/speciesinfo_fox.htm

I've been toying with the idea of expanding my first blog post into a personal essay that I could publish. If you're a Mormon then you've probably seen the anonymous "I struggle with unnatural power proclivity" articles in the Ensign. You know, the ones where the accompanying image is a man hidden in the shadows, angsting over his Very Big Problem. Yeah, that's not what I want to do. I want to publish an essay that is faithful and uplifting, but at the same time direct and honest about what it's like to be a Latter-day Mutant.

And I want to publish it under my real name.

The thought is terrifying, of course, so Jan suggested I test it first with my writing group. So this weekend I threw something together (it was easy because the essay was mostly composed in my head already), shared it with my Foxes on Google Docs, and this morning we discussed it. Chenry didn't show up today, which is a little unnerving (have I lost another friend?), but it went well with the other two. At first there was a bit of nervous laughter as everyone tried to gauge whether this was for real or I was just messing with them. Once we established that the essay was indeed non-fiction, Tara crossed the room to give me a hug. Galadriel joked about how she must be some kind of mutant magnet because I'm like the tenth of her friends to come out to her. And then we proceeded to critique each other's writing, as usual. No big deal.

So I passed the first test. Next I'm thinking of bringing the essay to my creative writing class. It's technically not against BYU policy to be a mutant, so long as I don't use my power, so I don't think I'd get in trouble with the Honor Code Office. And these are English majors we're talking about, who tend to be a little more open-minded than other BYU students. But still. I'm not sure I'm ready to open myself up that much. What do you think? Should I do it?

(...aaaand I'm going to be late to the UUPP meeting.)