Reggaeton for the niños

Scottie shared this with me, and I thought it would be unfair if I didn't pass it on to the world:

The shrinking gene hot tub of Spanish Fork: the good & the bad

Lily Mott once referred to my hometown of Spanish Fork as my "gene hot tub." I doubt there's ever been a more true statement in regards to me and The Fork. {Luckily my dad married someone from Minnesota, so I come from a gene kiddy pool.}

The closeness in relations in Spanish Fork while I was growing up has led to lots of great things. For example, I often knew part of the families of my uncles' wives. In fact, one year for Thanksgiving we went to my Aunt Bonnie's dad's house for dinner, and I just called him Grandpa Orr anyway. It was no big deal because small-town Spanish Fork is like that. {And to be honest, in a lot of situations, a lot of us were probably distantly related.}

Grandpa Orr died last week and his funeral was this last Monday, and my Aunt Bonnie gave an amazing--I mean AMAZING--talk about her father and the strength of family. I sat in a pew next to my mom and my Aunt Dana, who is married to the youngest uncle, Lynn, who was next to her, and, at the end, his mom, my Grandma Swenson. None of us are related to Grandpa Orr, but in a way it doesn't really feel like that. In Spanish Fork, the relations of your relations are thus your extended relations. I love it.

It's sad that this connection is being lost in large part because of the influx of people. SF doubled size in the 90s from 11,000 to 22,000+ and it now how about 33,000. This is good, though, because it means that the next generation of Spanish Forkers probably won't have 5 eyeballs and a genetically-mutated superfluous third leg.

holy religious vinyl lettering. what the what?

So I'm driving home and I pass this big, black SUV that has some vinyl lettering stuck to its back window on the driver's side. It took me a while to figure it out. See how long it takes you:

JESUS DIDN'T TAP


Now, I am no dancer, but the first thought that came to my mind was, "What, clogging, then?"


Maybe you're faster than me, but it finally hit me that they were going for this.

The best part? The T from TAP was a simple black cross.

Question about fears

I've had this question that I've been mulling around in my head for a while. Do you think fears that you carry into your adulthood ever truly go away?

I ask is because when I was in junior high I was terrified of escalators. But I overcame that after about a year or two of morbid fear.
At around the same time I started to realize that I was afraid of fish. (I know, my fears are weird.) I've been fighting that fear for a long time. I have a lot of it suppressed now (for example, tonight I had excellent sushi). But I've disconnected sushi from the live, scary fish mostly. And by live and scary, I'm also including Finding Nemo. Being able to watch it was a real accomplishment for me.*
I know that my fear is still underlying and I simply control it. But if you catch me off guard, hoo boy, it's quite the spectacle.

So, do you think fears that we carry into adulthood ever truly disappear, or do we just learn to control them, but carry at least a portion of the phobia somewhere in our psyche?


*I had a little episode when I searched out that picture. That fish brings back the fear, and how.
**I also recognize that, in writing this blog, I open myself up to large-scale mockery. I accept it.