An Everyday Mormon

Media has always been espoused to culture and culture to media.  Ever since writing and cave drawings existed, the way we entertain ourselves and others has directly influenced the way we live and what we believe in.  While rarely one movie or one painting changes the whole dynamic of the way we live our lives and the culture we are engrained in, in today’s day and age, some celebrities manage to make quite an indelible imprint.  One of those celebrities is Taylor Swift. I first heard about Taylor Swift in my cousins’ basement in the small farm town of Hartlyville in Southern Alberta.  I was eleven or so and wasn’t too interested in country music sung by an up and coming teenage girl.  She came to dominate the country music scene in the next few years, writing her own music and lyrics.  I firmly resisted as others, boys and girls around me, jumped on her bandwagon.  I finally succumbed after my sister would blast T-Swift’s then recently released album...

September 11th has always been a day of deep self-reflection.  I didn’t know anyone involved in the tragedy and I have never even been to New York.  I had barely turned six years old the day it happened.  I can’t remember much of the world before September 11th, 2001.  I’ll never know what it was like to walk into an airport with minimal security.  I will never know what it was like to not have to worry about such things as terrorism and racism abroad or at home. What I remember the most about that day was not the news broadcast or the the headlines but the reactions of the people I knew.  I remember my Mom somberly trying to explain to my sister and I what had happened on our way to school.  I remember every teacher at school seemed to be somewhere else, praying for and thinking about instead the people in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington.  I knew something bad had happened and could sense something wasn’t right but I was too young to u...

May 31 st , 2016 was one of the longest days of my life.  After spending two years away from my family and friends in Japan I was finally coming home.  It was a mixed bag of feelings.  I was excited to see my family and be in America again after such a long time away but at the same time I had to say goodbye to a people I had come to love and put behind me the lifestyle of a missionary.  All those memories of spreading the gospel of Christ in Japan have stayed with me all this time and not a day goes by where I don’t think and reflect on my time spent in Japan and the lessons I learned as I was in the Lord’s service. Today is June 3 rd , 2017, nearly a year after my journey back to America from Japan, I find myself flying back to America once again but this time it is from the other side of Asia in Jordan.  I was only gone a month and was back in Asia for a different reason.  Instead of being sent to Japan to preach the gospel, I went to Jordan and was...

If I could describe the work of a field archaeologist, I would have to let a few people down and say that what I’ve been doing hasn’t been like Indiana Jones at all.  No clues leading us to ancient relics or antagonistic forces trying to sabotage our projects or kill us.  Instead, I would use the movie Holes to describe my experience, except for I’d have to add a little bit more of us systematically digging.  I don’t know why they didn’t just use drones and aerial photography to help find out where the buried treasure was instead of having a bunch of delinquent teens dig holes for them but I get the builds character part of it.  We also don’t go and dig five foot wide and five foot deep holes but instead take a sectioned off piece of land and then clear the dirt off layer by layer and then sift through the dirt to see what things we can find.  Then we wash them, whether it is Nabataean pottery or Islamic beads, and then analyze them. The tomb by my new ...

One thing I hate more than anything in the world are the toilets that consist of just a whole in the ground that you have to crouch over to use.  I thought that I would only encounter them during my two year mission in Japan but I have come face to face with one here.  There are traditional Western toilets everywhere but there is one crouhcer in our house.  I tried to avoid it until the other day when I was taking a shower.  I had draped my pants over the wall separating the shower from the crouching toilet and as soon as I had done so I heard a thud.  I go to look at the crouching toilet in the sectional over and find that my pen had fallen from my pants pocket and landed straight into the hole in the ground with fecal matter and urine.  You may have won this one crouching toilet but I will get you next time! Things have been progressing on our site.  We are excavating an ancient Nabataean water collecting pool that would store runoff water near ...

It took only about 24 hours in total to get from the Salt Lake City airport to our beds in the Amman Airport Hotel.  It only took one day to transverse half of the globe, something Magellan would be pretty impressed by.  The thing that I am impressed by about the world I’ve learned through traveling is that every airport looks alike.  The Amman Airport, while no JFK, could definitely pass for a lower end airport somewhere in the middle of nowhere in America, minus all the Arabic written above the English words on signs.  The poster for McDonalds looked pretty much like American advertising and the hotel had the distinct feel of most motels I had stayed in on our family trips, including the inclusion of a continental breakfast. When we woke up the next morning and road in trucks and buses to Petra, the World Heritage Site where we are now digging up, I finally got to find out what the term “Third World Country” meant.  It wasn’t so much the armed military me...

This past semester I haven’t been quite faithful to posting on this blog.   Part of the reason is simple human nature of slacking off after awhile of working on something.  I think the main reason has been this past Winter semester.   What I thought would be a more relaxed semester turned out to be quite a hectic one.   My Basic Media Productions class turned out to be the main time guzzler.   Film projects turned out to be something that took me hours to prepare, shoot, and edit, which I had to do all by myself.   I learned a lot and learned specifically that film is not an easy course or an easy hobby. Lights, camera, action actually has a lot behind it.  Just ask the lighting guy who spends over an hour to get the lighting bouncing off of the actor’s face just right for a 30 second scene.  Just ask any of my fellow students how many problems they had trying to get their camera to co-operate.  Weeks of writing and adapting scripts, get...

February 14 th , the day revered yet shunned by so many.  Some call it St. Valentine’s Day, others call it Singles Awareness Day.  Some spend it with their loved one over a candlelight dinner while others spend it on their couches with a bucket of chocolate ice cream.  I usually find myself in the latter of those two groups. I sit on my couch thumbing for a movie on Netflix, listening to Spotify while catching up on homework, or just half watching a NBA game where a team is winning by 20 points in the fourth quarter.  Anything to entertain me just a bit.  It doesn’t usually feel much like a special day for me.  Maybe the big teddy bears I saw being carried around on campus or a few affectionate couples in the middle of an unpleasant PDA session stood out that day but nothing too special.  I open Facebook after turning the T.V. off as I get ready for bed.  I scroll a little bit to find just a bunch of really cushy Facebook posts about boy...

The year 2016 was a bit of a letdown to say the least.  The last week of 2016 wasn’t very friendly either, with such notable deaths as George Michaels, mother and daughter duo Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, and one very close to my heart, legendary BYU football coach LaVell Edwards.  Just when things couldn’t get any worse, another life was deemed in critical condition: that of the Utah based movie-filtering VidAngel. Don't let this happen! Launched in 2014, VidAngel provided hundreds of big time movies alongside with filters that the viewer would select before streaming the movie of their choice.  According to their website, VidAngel was built on the two beliefs that one, movies can change lives for the better and two, people “ should have the personal freedom to watch [movies] in the way they choose”. 1 Because of these two founding beliefs, VidAngel allows the viewer to filter out of their movies what they don’t want to see, whether that be full frontal nu...