do geese see god

 do geese see god

• A palindrome 

Do geese see God?

• A question inquiring about whether geese are able to see God?

Do geese see, God?

• A question, directed to God, asking about whether or not geese can see?

Do “geese see God.”

• A command, asking that someone pantomime a scene in which geese see God.

Do “geese see,” God.

• A command, asking that God pantomime a scene wherein geese receive the ability to see.

Do, geese! See God!

• An encouragement, imploring geese to see God. 

Do-Geese! See, God?

• An exclamation of wonder upon seeing “do-geese,” a specific and rare variety of geese, followed by a turn to God, and an invitation that He too partake in this wondrous scene.

Do?! Geese! See, God?

• A surprised exclamation of someone finding poop on the ground (which they euphemistically call “Do”), followed by an angry yell directed at the geese (the apparent purveyors of the poop), followed in turn by a command that God see what these geese have done.

Do? Geese see God!

• An incredulous response to a request that the speaker “do” something. As if to explain this incredulity, or perhaps as a counterargument, the speaker responds that geese see God.  

Do geese “see God?”

• A question asking about whether geese euphemistically “see God,” which in this case probably means “get high on mushrooms.”

Do “geese;” see God.

• An equation, asserting that if you act like geese (i.e. waddle about making an almighty racket, be overly territorial and terrifying to children, gather together a group of friends and cover the grass of every public park in Chicago with your poop, etc.), then you will see God.

~~~~~~

A Domestic Goose (Embden Goose) in Tasmania, Australia | photo by JJ Harrison | CC BY-SA 3.0

On Dodgeball and Forgiveness

One day when I was in 4th or 5th grade a huge crowd of kids collected to play dodgeball during recess on the dodgeball circles that were painted on the asphalt “playground” on the west side of Bluffdale Elementary School. Actually, I’m pretty sure it was 4th grade, because that was the first year Bluffdale Elementary was open, and the school district hadn't brought in any portable classrooms yet to deal with overcrowding. The presence of these portable classrooms is relevant to my story here because when they were brought in, they got parked right on top of the dodgeball circles that provide the setting of this story. If it weren't for the fact that my friends and I had shifted our recreative attentions to basketball by the time the "portables" took up residence, I'm certain there would have been considerable, though ultimately futile, outrage regarding their placement. Such outrage would have been misplaced because, honestly, it was a terrible idea to paint circles on asphalt and encourage kids to throw balls at one another in them. The skinned knee that makes an appearance in the story-to-come was a clearly anticipatable and preventable injury. So parking the portables where they did was a serendipitous byproduct of the school district’s bureaucratic short-sightedness (and/or cheap-skatedness) manifested in its building a school that, within a year, was already over-crowded. I probably shouldn’t be so critical of school districts and their decisions. I have no idea how they make the decisions they make and I haven’t done my mile-shoe-walking, etc. But here I'm getting away from the story I came to tell. So, back to that lovely Spring day in 4th grade when there was a big dodgeball game going at recess.

The size of the game is important to note here because it was hard to get enough people together to play a decent game of dodgeball. Especially when they had the whole world of recess opportunities open to them and a mere 20 or 30 minutes in which to take advantage. So having such a large game was a rare and wonderful thing. In the run-up to the game getting going, probably during the teams being chosen, I remember specifically thinking I needed to make the most of this opportunity and have as much fun and as good of a time as I could, because these kinds of dodgeball games didn't come around all that often. 

Just thinking about this game, I can still smell the way your hands smell when they’ve been dirtied by a rubber ball that has, in turn, been dirtied by asphalt. And I can still feel the occasionally painful roughness of a rubber dodgeball as it is thrown/caught/ricocheted off one’s face. And my stomach still remembers the thrill of elation that accompanies a successful dodge as well as the devastating shame and disappointment of being gotten out. It's a cliche of cliches to rhapsodize about wanting to return to these halcyon moments of childhood, so it’s probably a good thing that this story isn’t headed in that direction. 

Don’t get me wrong, for most of the kids playing dodgeball that day, this probably was about as near an approximation of the platonic ideal of elementary school recess as could be asked for. But for me, and for Ben Tolman, this was not such a day. At least, not in the way you might think.

Ben and I were the same age and lived a mere 2-3 miles away from one another, but we weren't in the same class, and, if memory serves, he was on A track or maybe B, and I was on D track. So while we both took up residence in the same basic plane of existence and in fairly proximal social circles, the year-round school schedule made it so we didn't see much of one another. Whenever we did interact and play together, we did so on friendly enough terms, but he was, from my experience, just another one of the many somewhat flat characters that existed on the fringes of my life, which, as everyone can agree, is the central plot of all human drama. 

I can't remember blow-by-blow account of exactly what happened in the dodgeball game that day, but I remember enough to remember that there was an altercation between me and Ben. One of us probably did something to get the other one out of the game, and the getter outer probably did their getting out a bit underhandedly or in a way that resulted in some kind of uncertainty about whether the one of us that was allegedly gotten out was, in fact, out. 

You'll remember that there were considerably more kids playing this day than usual, and so, while having a crowd made the game that much more exciting and wonderful, it also made getting out that much more devastating, because it meant you had to wait longer to be able to play again. And to be gotten out in such a game by illicit and/or uncertain means was the absolutely height of unfairness. To make matters worse, whatever it was that the getter had done to get the other of us out had also resulted in a skinned knee for the gotten, adding further insult to the miserable unfairness of the situation. 

So the one of us that was gotten out decided to protest vociferously about whether he was, in very fact, out, thus causing the game grind to a halt. This was by design, of course, as the allegedly out boy assumed that the assembled masses would readily side with him. Surely these clear-eyed, cool-judging 9-year-olds could see just how egregious the offending out-getting was. In fact, they would probably see that it was so egregious that not only should the one of us who was provisionally out not be out, but, rather, the shady getter outer who committed this heinous crime against the holy institution of recess dodgeball should be the actual one made to be out.

As I’ve written out this remembrance of the altercation I've realized that I was almost certainly the one gotten out and Ben did the getting. As is true of most 9-year-olds, I went about all aspects of my life with a righteous assurance that I was always right about everything. (If you want a corroborating witness, just ask my sister Heather.) So it feels all-too-familiar that I would be the one outraged beyond all reason at the unfairness of having been got out due to some patently unjust play while engaged in this, the most transcendent dodgeball game in all of human history. 

Anyway, I ranted and carried on for some time, appealing to everyone that I wasn’t actually supposed to be out. But everyone didn’t really care who was out, they just wanted to keep playing. So they told us both to get lost and to quit ruining the game. 

As I left the game fuming about how wronged I was, the truth is I was mostly just crushed to be on the outside of the only important dodgeball game that had ever been played. And, frankly, that was a considerably more painful blow than the one that had caused the trickle of blood dripping from my knee. 

As I started to cool down and began considering what, among the vastly inferior options, I was going to do with the rest of my recess, I started to feel more and more awful. But not from being kicked out of the game, and not from being on the receiving end of an unjust ruling, and not from being told I was ruining recess by everyone whose opinion I actually cared about. No, I realized I was feeling awful about how my making such a big deal out of the issue made it so that Ben was kicked out of the game too.

That dodgeball game was the only thing I cared about in the whole world right then, and, in a rare moment of clarity wherein I comprehended that I was not the only being in existence with complex thoughts, feelings, desires, and motivations, I realized that maybe Ben wanted to play just as much as I did. And in contemplating this I realized that if our places had been switched, I would’ve tried to get Ben out by doing the same things he had done to get me out, and probably more. In contrast, he probably wouldn’t have been such a whiner about getting out like I was. And that thought, coupled with the fact that it was my whining and pleading and game-stopping that got him kicked out of the game, was eating away at me and making me thoroughly miserable.

So, rather go for a swing on the swing set, or chuck dirt clods at whatever it is kids chuck dirt clods at, or do any of the other activities on offer that I might ordinarily have done, I started looking for Ben to apologize. And it wasn't too long before I found him because, you see, he had been looking for me too.

It came out that both of us had been feeling pretty crummy along pretty similar lines. That is, while both of us were somewhat at fault for the situation — though clearly I was the more culpable of the two of us — we were both feeling complete ownership of the guilt for the whole situation, and we both felt compelled to tell the other how sorry we were. 

Make no mistake, this was no grand cinematic apology. There were no eloquent speeches, no sweeping admissions of wrong-doing, no gracious acceptances of the other's apology, and no plaintive orchestral score accentuating the emotional poignancy of the moment. We both probably just kind of mumbled and stumbled our way through our apologies, and that was the extent of it.

Though our apologies lacked the showmanship and panache of a more practiced repentant sinner, the results were not less miraculous. Where I had been feeling increasingly miserable because of the guilt-ridden pit in my stomach that deepened with every step away from the dodgeball game, after chatting briefly with Ben I felt wonderful. I felt light and free. I felt like laughing and smiling. And while I can't say for certain that Ben felt the exact same way, I was pretty sure he did because where he had come up to me with shoulders hunched and head down, now he was smiling broadly and openly, reflecting back to me the joy that I was feeling. 

It would be a nice, Frank Capra-esque ending auto this story to say that a deep and abiding friendship was born on the back of that moment of reconciliation, but it wouldn't be true. Ben and went back to existing on the peripheries of one another's lives. And that would have probably continued to be the case if not for the fact that a few years later the State of Utah decided it needed to build a new highway through my family's front yard, causing us to move to another part of Bluffdale. And who should be at church that first Sunday after we moved but Ben Tolman himself. 

Being the same age, Ben and I attended the same classes at church, and we were in the same Boy Scout troop, so by the natural course of events we became much better and closer friends. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was Ben that, for one of my early teen birthdays, gave me that fateful bag of Starbursts that I ate in its entirety in the space of about an hour, and that my stomach rejected in short order, and that resulted in the most stunningly colorful vomit that ever was vomited.  

I’m pretty sure that even without our post-dodgeball dustup mutual apology we would have still become the good friends down the road that we became. After all, when you spend a lot of time with people your own age, and those people aren't outright jerks, there's a pretty good chance you'll be friends. (And maybe even sometimes when they are outright jerks too.) Over the course of that friendship, I don’t even thing we've ever talked about the dodgeball incident. I honestly wouldn't be at all surprised if Ben doesn't remember that it even happened. 

In the course of human events, it really wasn’t that remarkable of an occasion. Two kids whose problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world got their feelings hurt and then made up. Great. But sometimes it’s those unremarkable events that I can’t help but remember 30 years later and that I feel compelled to remark upon on Sunday evenings when I’m in a more contemplative mood.

Of Banana Slugs, SEO, and Finding Joy in Little Things

In the fall of 2000, Jasmine Morrow, an undergraduate student at San Francisco State University, was taking a Biogeography course (GEOG 316). In that course it seems Jasmine was required to write ~1500 words about the biogeography of the banana slug, and then to publish that biogeography on the web. Jasmine chose to use a light blue background for the site, pairing it with a sufficiently contrasting shade of brown for the text. In keeping with the times, Comic Sans was selected as the font du jour. It was and is, a fantastic representative example of the amateur web design of the era:

Fast forward 20 years and we find a young English professor who has finished his work for the day. While waiting for his wife to finish her meeting about seismic...engineerings, he decides he wants to learn more about where he might go to find banana slugs. So he types "banana slug range" into the Google search bar and hits "return." 

Let's pause in our narrative for a moment -- the suspense is palpable, I know, and I apologize -- to talk about search engines.

The very first result on the very first page of a search engine results list is, as we all know, the most prized of all positions in which a website might find itself. That first page is the object of an entire industry in the modern marketplace. Dozens of my very own friends have dedicated their lives to helping companies land their websites on this most auspicious of real estate.

Occasionally though, when a website answers a search engine user's query so perfectly that its greatness cannot be denied, the search engine will go beyond merely giving the site a place on its coveted page-1 results, and it will further extoll the virtues of this website by copypasting some of the website's text onto page 1 itself, naming this a "featured snippet." 

This is, truly, the highest honor to which any website can hope to aspire.

Returning again to our young English professor who has finished his work and who wants to learn more about slugs, as he sets forth on his quest, typing the words "banana slug range" and hitting "return," he finds that the Google has returned to him a first result featured snippet. 

The source of this most exalted website was not, as one might have guessed, a Wikipedia page (search result #2). 

It was not an eminently credible science outreach publication (search result #3). 

It did not feature the work of scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying biologies and geographies and such (search result #s 4, 5, 6, and 7)

No, none of these. 

Instead, as you've surely guessed, the search engine algorithm gods (so inscrutable and powerful are the ways of the search engine algorithm that it unquestionably merits being described so) bestowed this honor upon none other than the lowly undergrad Jasmine Morrow's light blue, Comic Sans-y homework website, "The Biogeography of the Banana Slug." 

My friends, I am the young English professor in this tale. (Twist!) 

And let me say that in this moment, the cup of my joy is full to overflowing.

On Playing Music

When I was younger, from the ages of about 8 to 18, I took piano lessons from an angel of a woman, Shari Aston. I'm not exaggerating at all when I say that Shari teaching me how to play the piano has had a deep and profound influence in all areas of my life, and in ways that I probably am not totally aware. But one way in which I am aware of this influence is in the ways that music, and the playing of it, has helped me through life's difficult moments.

I'm a relatively cheerful, easy-going fellow, so it may surprise some to hear (read) me saying that I have hard times, but it shouldn't. Everyone does, and I'm no exception to that. And in those hard times, I've always found that playing music brings a relief and even joy where it has seemed like there could be none. And I wanted to take a minute to talk (write) about it.

My parents' piano at home in Bluffdale, UT

When I was getting my bachelor's and master's degrees, I was lucky enough to attend school where a large number of the classrooms on campus had pianos in them. So whenever I got stressed over a test or overwhelmed by social pressures or really frustrated at the football or basketball team losing (you know, the big things), I could always go up to campus, find an empty classroom (they were typically open until 11 pm), and play. More often than not I didn't play any of the more difficult pieces I'd learned over the years. Rather, I played whatever felt right in that moment, which was usually something relatively simple. And in doing so, peace, in varying degrees, would return to my life.

One of the hardest things about starting my PhD program was that I was at a new school where I no longer had ready access to a piano on campus. And things got real stressful real fast. So after about a month in the program, I got on Craigslist and bought myself a guitar, knowing that I couldn't reasonably bring a piano (even a free one) home to my drafty, thin-walled, 2nd story apartment. Buying the guitar was a little outside of my budget (most everything was then), but it seemed a worthwhile investment in my mental and emotional health. I had no idea how to play, but I figured I could probably teach myself enough that I might access the stress-relieving aspects of playing music that I needed. And in time I did. And that guitar is one of the many factors that helped me survive those first few years. 

When we moved to California after graduating and as I started work, life predictably got stressful in new and *ahem* interesting ways. I still had my guitar and found it helped, but I missed playing the piano regularly as it had been several years since I'd been able to do so. Not long after we moved, I was asked at church if I would play the piano for the Primary. I agreed and began to spend 1-2 hours on Sundays hanging out with kids, pulling faces at them, and trying to play the piano well enough for them to be able to sing along. (I wasn't always successful at that last bit.) Since we don't have a piano at home, I was given a key to the church so that I could practice. And it was wonderful. In playing the piano again more regularly, I could more readily feel life's tensions melt somewhat away. Then, after 6 months or so of playing for the Primary, the organist in the ward moved out, and I was asked if I would play the organ for Sacrament Meeting. 

Now, I want to be clear that I don't consider myself a musician. I play alright, the piano at least, but I'm very uncomfortable with playing in front of an audience, no matter how low stakes the setting or how small the audience actually is. And here they wanted me to play the organ, an instrument with which I had very little experience, in front of upwards of 200 people, on a weekly basis? Despite my misgivings, and fully aware of my inadequacy, I agreed. But in doing so I knew that I'd have to start coming over to the church more regularly to practice and get ready for Sundays. 

So for about a year (up until the pandemic), I spent 6-10 hours a week at the church teaching myself how to play the organ and practicing so that I could, at very least, not be too much of a distraction from the spirit of the meeting. And while I'm no Richard Elliot (far, far, FAR from it), I got to where I could get by fairly well each week. Well, except for the one week when Shar was out of town, and I bombed so hard on the hymn "For All the Saints" that afterwards a friend in the congregation said to me sympathetically, "As you were starting to play the 5th verse, I leaned over to my husband and said, 'How bad do you think Sam wants to be done right now?'"

But the important thing here isn't that I got better at the organ, the important thing is that this assignment forced me to spend A LOT more time playing music. I started practicing first thing in the morning, before going to campus, and it changed the complexion of my professional life. Those days when I practiced the organ were considerably brighter, more productive, and just overall better, despite the stress and anxiety of feeling like I wasn't (amn't) good enough at my job.

In writing this I'm not trying to brag about how wonderful of a person I am because I can play around a bit on a couple of instruments. If anything, I'm still terribly self-conscious of my musical abilities, and am always a little hesitant to even tell people I play at all for fear that they'll want to actually hear me. But in this season of thanksgiving, I want to express gratitude for the undeserved, unearned, and beautiful gift of music. 

Music makes no sense to me. Somehow, by contorting your body in very specific and objectively weird ways, while in appropriate proximity to an awkward assemblage of inanimate objects, a (sometimes) beautiful sound is produced. 

And that sound, I've come to appreciate, can be a blessed balm to the soul, especially in times of struggle and difficulty. It somehow manages to wriggle into all of the achy, empty places inside, and it fills them with light and hope. And, well, I think that's really lovely. And I'm grateful for it.

I Have a Problem and I Need Your Advice and It Is Absolutely Urgent

Okay folks. I have need for some good advice on a dire situation that I'm facing. If I'm reading things correctly -- and I know that I am because I went to college for 12 years to ensure that I know how to read things correctly -- the decision I make in the face of this situation might not merely affect my own life, but it has the potential to hold sway over the hopes and dreams of literally, and I am using that word very conscientiously, hundreds of thousands of people every fall.

To get a sense of the gravity of the situation, I'd like you to consider for a moment this cabin:

It's lovely, right? The setting is nice. The trees are beautiful. You can almost smell the mountain pines and fresh, natural air. But let's take a closer look:

The cabin is old. Decrepit. Empty. There's a broken bed in the dark, dank interior. The screen door hangs limply. The windows are crusted over. The family that once inhabited is long since gone. Probably dead. No one knows who this R.D. Skidmore was, just as no one will likely know you once you are 50 years past your shuffling off this mortal coil. Life is short. Life is not fair. Life, in a word, is pain.

Now that you're in the mood and you have a sense of the gravity of the situation, allow me to describe the context of the decision that I'm facing before asking for the much-needed advice:

Let's say you are an incredibly superstitious sports fan, and today your team played one of the more storied programs in all of college football (top 15 all time according to the worldwide leader). Let's say that the game was pretty rocky to start and frankly not looking great, so at halftime you decided to go do other things like read scriptures with your wife to get your mind off it. And then you came back into the room only to realize that the game had already begun again, and that while you were gone, your team intercepted the opposing team's quarterback and subsequently had scored a touchdown. Encouraged with the newfound momentum, you sat down and settled in to watch. And immediately the other team started to play really well. And your team started to not look so great. A kernel of an idea started to form, so you decide, tentatively, that maybe you need to leave again. Just to see what happens. And so you leave fore a while, but the game is a siren song that can't be ignored so you come back. And the minute you came back, you watched the opposing team's running back run for like 30 yards. So you leave again.

And you yo-yo like this for the rest of the game. And every time you were out of the room your team did great things. And also every time you came back into the room you saw the opponent's team do things that were, for their purposes, great, but that for your purposes were decidedly not great. And so you decide to leave for good. But you're still following the stats on your phone because somehow that doesn't seem to affect anything. And then as the game was coming to an end and when the opposing team had a 99.9% chance of winning and when you were out of the room, you started to feel pretty good about things. Because the team was going to lose, but you weren't there to see it happen, so it clearly wasn't your fault but rather some other cosmic force was at play here. And you start to relax.

BUT THEN, with just seconds to play, your team did some borderline miraculous thing and they scored, and by doing so forced overtime.

So you stayed out of the room. And while you were out of the room, your team scored a touchdown in overtime to take the lead in the game for the first time. At this point you had been doing some pretty heavy reasoning with yourself, and you had concluded with much adamance that you know with every logical fiber of your being that your presence before the television set can have no impact on individuals' -- strangers, really -- abilities to play a game 2500 miles away. So you came back in to watch the end of the game and to see your team win and relish in the accompanying joy. And then nearly immediately after you came back in, the opposing team scored a touchdown to force a second overtime.

Mildly shellshocked, you became aware that you had to go to the bathroom, so you went away again. And you lingered away because you still had your phone and the live stats. And as you lingered, your team won the game in the 2nd overtime.

Naturally you were overjoyed at your team winning, but there frankly wasn't as much overjoy as there would have been had you watched it.

Now, any being with any ounce of reasonability would attest to the fact that your actions, specifically with regard to your viewing habits and your general presence in front of the television set, directly affected the outcome of this game.

D.I.R.E.C.T.L.Y.

Thinking ahead to next week, and the weeks beyond, you are left with a very large concern. There seems to be a new rule coming into effect after some 33 years of fandom. You watch; your team loses. You avoid watching; your team wins. Simple.

The world would have you think that winning=happiness and losing=misery. So, logically, under this new rule, not watching=happiness.

But it's more complicated than that: While you acknowledge that sports and such have no real eternal significance, you also know that the action of *watching* your team play, win or lose, brings very real enjoyment to your life. The watching itself makes you feel kinda like this:

Certainly winning is better. And when you win really big ones, and you get to watch, you might feel a little something like this:

But when you don't watch, even though winning is nice and helps a fair bit, when the dust settles, win or lose, you feel more like this:

That said, you know that the world doesn't center around you. You know firsthand that other people also are brought very real enjoyment by watching your team play and very realer enjoyment by watching them win.

And so we arrive to the part where I ask your advice and you give it to me. If you were in such a situation, what would you do? Would you sacrifice your own pleasure for the greater good? I mean, if you could guarantee -- GUARANTEE -- that your team would win by the mere act of not watching them actually do it, would you? There is still joy in the win. Sure. But because you know the sheer and utter enjoyment of both watching AND winning, the joy of watchless winning is quite and considerably less. And isn't the fact that you know that you are not actually experiencing the full allotment of joy available it's own class of misery? Would you willingly increase the misery of your own life, knowing you've created greater joy for others?

It might be easy for you, dear reader, sitting outside and above the situation to say, "Well, my dear Sam, certainly it is incumbent upon you to do all you can to provide for the well-being of your neighbor." I get that that's the right answer. Logically. But, as the paterfamilias has taught us, it's a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart. Put yourself in my shoes here. What would you do?

On America and Patriotism and If/Where They Fit at Church