My first sketch...

...since deciding I wanted to be an artist a few hours ago. I'm not going to count the eye that I drew, since it's really more like part of a sketch. I want to be able to look back in a year and think that this is really terrible because of how awesomely I've improved, but today, I'm pretty happy with it.



Dad thinks it turned out looking a bit like Angela Montenegro from Bones.

I will be the greatest artist in the world!

My younger sister is an artist. She mostly draws very strange looking muscular aliens, but she's been branching out a lot more recently. Her best work, I think, are her charcoal still-life portraits. Which she refuses to post online for some reason.

She writes too, occasionally. In fact, I was all jealous and resentful of her recently because she's working on the first couple of chapters of what will probably turn out to be her best work so far. It's a funny urban fantasy with some HILARIOUS main characters who remind me desperately of a few of our old friends. It's exactly what I feel like writing right now.

However, I am in the middle of a very pensive, intense, girly fantasy book that takes place in a fantasy world. Its not real funny and its full of chicks. Por todos lados. These girls are starting to drive me crazy. I want to work with some characters who have a little more testosterone, ya know? I want someone to get shot, or punched in the nose or have their car stolen... No more of this pretty girls prancing through the forest weirdness.

Don't get me wrong. I'm in the mood to read that stuff de vez en cuando. I can usually only handle it for a day or two at a time, which is fine when I'm reading the book, because it'll only take me a few hours to read it and then I can watch Rocky again if I feel over-chickified. I was really into this story for the first month I was writing it, but when I write a book, I kind of have to live in that world for the duration of time it takes me to write it, which is one reason why I've been trying to finish the rough drafts of my novels faster and faster, so I can escape before it gets old.

Anyway, I'm all irritated with Jensen-pie right now. Not only is she working on the book that I feel like writing and she still refuses to use her talents as an artist for my devices. So, I got frustrated last week and told her that I was just going to have to become the greatest artist in the whole world and then I could draw all the hundreds of commissions that I've given her over the years and that she has failed to complete.

The point of this rambling is that I'm trying to become the greatest artist in the world. This is very difficult for me, as I've never studied art or really had much of an interest in it before last week (Exception: I did illustrate and write this one children's book once.)

They say that the best way to learn something is to teach someone else, so here is me teaching the internet how to sketch an eyeball.

Step one: draw a circle.










Step two: draw a sort of screwed up circle around that circle.











Step three: add a funky thing to make an eyebrow above your circles.












Step four: add all the other eye stuff.

What's your birthday/favorite color/have you eaten sushi in the last month?

I rediscovered this a while ago. It’s a ‘getting-to-know-you’ questioner that I started to write. I don’t remember what it was for. It might have been a birthday card for Kate.

Q: If you could have the singing voice of anyone living or dead, who would it be? Why?

A: Louise-Rosalie Dugazon. I want to know what she sounds like!

Q: One rock band that you listen to frequently is secretly a troop of vampires. Who is it?

A: probably Depeche Mode.

Q: The Zombie apocalypse has come. Out of the clothing that you already own, what do you wear whilst fighting legions of the unholy walking-dead? (It’s August and you live in Houston.)

A: My green river-rat skirt, buccaneer kicks and Dirty Dash T-shirt.

Q: You’re on a date with deceased poet Alexander Pope. Who takes the check?

A: “I got this one, Alex.”

Q: You have permission to request a hug from one celebrity, who do you choose?

A: Stephen Fry! No… Ron Perlman. Stephen Fry. Ron? Err… Gary Oldman!

Ummm… Ron Perlamn. Come back to me.

Q: If you were to invite four fictional supervillains to a tea-party, who would they be? Why?

A: Hannibal Lector (I’ll be polite) The Joker, Skeletor and Lord Zed. Why? Best facebook profile picture ever.

Q: Do you want a Monkey?

A: You know I do.

Q: Can you do any accents? Like, well enough that you could impersonate/pass for some else in a hypothetical emergency?

A: I can do a reasonably good southern drawl.

Q: So… ever killed anyone?

A: You’re running out of ideas already, aren’t you?

Q: Shut up.

Note to Self

Some personal writing notes that I recently found. I wrote these for myself a bit ago with the hope that these notes would prevent me from sliding into lame territory.

Notes to Self:

Dear Salsa,

No teenage boys running their hands through their hair. Ever.

Try to avoid using the word seductive when talking about teenage boys at all, also. At least, real teenage boys. It’s understandable if they are vampires or secretly adult policeman in disguise or something, but most young men actually between the ages of 12 and 18 aren’t all that seductive. They’re awkward. That’s the word you’re looking for. Awkward can be charming, but seductive? Huh?

Avoid too many current pop-culture references. A general rule of a decade to prove authenticity would be nice. I.E. It’s probably okay to mention Batman Begins or Pirates of the Caribbean at this point, since they have shown some staying power through the last decade and will probably enjoy relevance for a few generations at least, but avoid quick references to Jersey Shore or other dross that no one will remember or care about in a few minutes.

Let’s not have the big thematic reveal of the story be given through a Google-search. It makes sense, but it’s a total cop-out. Examples of defaulting to Google; Twilight & Hush Hush. Both of these are books that I like a lot, but the Google-reveals in both of them were disappointing. Come on! Give me a big dramatic confrontation, instead. PLEASE!

Thanks Chola, Salsa

June 27, 1844

Last night I went to the Mormon Miracle Pageant in Manti. Locally, The Manti Pageant. I’ve never gone, having heard conflicting reports for years about whether it was an overall positive experience or not. Plus, it’s way-the-heck-out-there. With the encouragement of friends, we decided to go.

I only saw a couple of protesters. Someone tried to give me a million dollar bill with Joseph Smith’s likeness on it. I’m not sure what that was about, but in retrospect I wish I’d taken it, so I could at least scan it into the computer and post it or something fun. In the moment I just felt like I shouldn’t encourage them, or take anything they were offering since it might make them think it’s okay to start yelling at me about crap I’ve already heard hashed and re-hashed and copied and facsimiled and lost and dug up and laid out to dry then read over and over and over and over and over again. And again.

Not to sound bitter, but even before my mission in the big old Texas shaped belt buckle of the Bible belt, I’d heard it all.

As far as protesters that I’ve encountered goes, these ones were almost polite. Most of them stayed away this year, which is pleasant since they’ve been known to get nasty. I even smiled when uncomfortable eye-contact was made just because they were so very non-threatening. Not like that freak dressed up in a velvet devil costume who almost smacked me in the forehead with a burned copy of the Book of Mormon when I was just trying to get to my car at General Conference last October.

Anyway, the point is, the experience was very positive and spiritual over all. My sister can tell you about the voice recording that is clearly forty years old, but whatever, I cried along with everyone else. It’s emotional. It’s beautiful. I’m definitely going back next year.

June 27, 1844 Joseph Smith Jr. was martyred. He wasn’t the only one, either. His brother and my ancestor Hyrum Smith died that day with him.

This next Monday it will make one-hundred and sixty seven years since the events in Carthage.

The depiction of the attack at Carthage was very well done and powerful. Very touching. As with other depictions of Joseph’s martyrdom, it was missing some details. Anti-Mormons love to bring up the fact that Joseph had a gun that was snuck into him in jail by his friends and he fired back at the mob firing on him. They also like to point out that he jumped out the window. The reason they do this is because they think it negates what he stood for if he resorted to defending himself and his friends, or if he tried to escape. If they can prove that Joseph was a coward, then he deserved to be persecuted, right?

I’ve often heard Joseph’s status as a martyr disputed.

A martyr is someone who is killed because of something they believe in. Whether or not they fight back or even whether what they believe in is true or not is completely incidental. Martyrs can be made by angry mobs, bigoted neighbors, government sanction…

Personally, I do not believe that anything Joseph did was shameful. He was not a God. He was a man, a great man and a prophet, but still human. He did not have the power to save himself. He fired a gun to defend himself, his brother’s corpse and his friends. It was the futile struggle of a man who knew he was going to die; a man whose friends were so sure that he was in danger that they decided to smuggle a pepper-box pistol to him.

I’m glad he jumped out the window. If he hadn’t, he would have kept drawing the gunfire into the room with his friends and his brother who had already been shot and killed through the door. If Joseph Smith hadn’t jumped through the window, bullets would have kept flying, then my other great-great-great grandfather Willard Richards might have been shot and killed, just like Hyrum Smith, lying still on the ground with a gunshot wound to the face, just a few feet away. I never would have been born.

Whatever the reason Joseph went for the window, the result is that it ended the attack. Willard Richards and John Taylor left Carthage alive.

It’s personal to me, because that was my family being persecuted.

So, why does it continue? Why are there people out there who still work to try and negate the good that my ancestors have done by exploiting and misrepresenting their humanity? It’s pretty simple to trace the pathology actually.

They are terrified that people might think that the persecution of my people and my family legitimizes our belief that God called a prophet to restore the fullness of the gospel and the priesthood authority that had been lost in apostasy after the martyrdom of Jesus Christ and his apostles.

They don’t believe it, so they try to say that we were never persecuted; that we deserved the hardships that came to us because of our foolish choices and our false beliefs.

Interestingly enough, this constitutes further persecution.

Christian Brethren, anyway you turn this, it still looks like a big smelly pile of excrement of bull to me. Jesus had a lot to say about how you should treat your neighbor and what you should do with your time, especially a particularly lovely Tuesday night in Manti. Help a neighbor with yard work? Go to a spiritually uplifting pageant? Stay home and read the Bible?

I’ll admit that it hurts my heart a little that my Church almost seems ashamed to depict the martyrdom with all its details. I don’t think we have anything to be ashamed off.

I was thinking about this a lot last week. This morning, while reading the scriptures, I came across this verse in Alma that really spoke to me.

I would that ye should do as I have done, in remembering the captivity of our fathers; for they were in bondage, and none could deliver them except it was the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and God of Jacob; and he surely did deliver them in their afflictions. - Alma 36:2

The context is talking about different fathers and different bondage, but the God is the same. God of Abraham. God of Isaac. God of Jacob. God of Joseph and Hyrum. God of Ailsa.

By the world’s definition, Joseph Smith Jr. was a martyr. However, what the world thinks really doesn’t matter. It may have been the world who imprisoned Joseph, but God Delivered him. His final worlds, “Oh Lord, my God,” were directed towards his maker and mine. Nothing that any anti-Mormon nutcase or sophisticated intellectual philosopher can say will ever change that Joseph Smith met his maker as a martyred prophet. I know that this is true because it had been confirmed to repeatedly by the Holy Ghost, most recently, while I read a verse in Alma chapter thirty-six verse two.

My fathers were in bondage and none could deliver them except it was their God.

Why, I ask you?

If only I had found you years ago, Janice.

...might have saved me a lot of revisions.

Other things I wish I had discovered sooner in life:

This website.

This book.

This woman.

This band.

This blog.

This monkey!

Three and One-half Showers later.

Gross & Fun. The Dirty Dash