I didn’t really bother me, getting a glimpse of my unhealthy future. I’m not really scared of death (unless that death comes by drowning in a undersea science lab whose structure has collapsed in on itself – omgosh that’d be terrifying). It did, however give me a final push to do start doing something I’d always wanted to do: completely live the Mormon code of health, the Word of Wisdom.

Most people know that Mormons don’t drink alcohol, coffee, or tea, smoke, or do illicit drugs. When I was a missionary, we had a pink flip chart that listed the Big Five which was probably the only page I ever really used. (Well, that and the one with Heavenly Father and Jesus visiting Joseph Smith. See? Two people! Count them. Two!) But there is more to the Word of Wisdom that we usually mumbled through. There is a lot of talk of grains, fruits, and vegetables. Every so often in the Church magazine, The Ensign, there is some talk that goes on and on about how the Word of Wisdom contains more Thou Shalt than Thou Shalt Not, which is true. I’ve never used tobacco, alcohol, or drugs and aside from a couple of moments where I wasn’t paying close attention to what I was drinking, I’ve never had tea or coffee. That part of the Word of Wisdom, I have down. But the Word of Wisdom does contain a Thou Shalt (Sometimes) clause that I’ve always wondered about:

Yea, flesh also of beasts and of the fowls of the air, I, the Lord, have ordained for the use of man with thanksgiving; nevertheless they are to be used sparingly; (D&C 89:14)

Sure, it says we can eat meat and the footnotes are filled with plenty of references to meat=good scriptures (in order to prevent us from turning into godless vegans). And whose to say what “sparingly” means anyway? Apparently God. In the next verse:

And these hath God made for the use of man only in times of famine and excess of hunger. (D&C 89:15)

Aw, crap. Famine and excess of hunger. I can single-handedly destroy a Chick-fil-a. Why do Mormons see the proliferation of Starbucks as a the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse (named “Jitters”), yet have no issues with holding pig-roast ward activities? (Delicious, yes, but do we have to put the pig’s head on the end of the table?) Why aren’t Mormons the world’s largest group of flexitarians?

Maybe we are just reacting to the heathen hemp-wearing, PETA supporting, soy milk drinking hipsters with their meat-is-murder and their mopey indie rock. We all know where that leads. I even found myself reacting strongly against it while (briefly) living in North Hollywood. My breaking point was hearing someone who smoked and drank alcohol talk about all the dangerous chemicals in processed foods. Really? Is that an organic Virginia Slim? Is that free-range tequila? Southern California represented the epitome of hypocritical diet lecturing. Please. Your avocados will not save you.

I said as I ate an In-N-Out burger, animal style.

I knew that I wanted to drastically cut back on my meat intake, even if only for the health benefits, but I also knew that cutting out cold turkey, well, “cold turkey” wasn’t going to happen. I decided to go in phases. My first phase I decided to cut out beef. My rule is that if I am eating at someone’s house and they prepare beef, I eat it. I don’t want to be one of “those people”, after all, but aside from a couple of incidents (apparently some gyros have lamb and beef), I’ve been cow-free for a month or so.  Surprisingly, except for corned-beef Reuben sandwiches, I haven’t really felt its fault.

Even more surprising is how I react now when I do eat beef.  I feel disappointed.  It’s almost like after the first time I watched an R-rated movie.  I was eight.  It was “Sleeping With The Enemy” and I walked away with a strong feeling of “that wasn’t worth it”.  Neither were the chicken nachos that contained a hidden base of pulled beef in the refried beans.  (If I wanted beef, I would have ordered the beef nachos.  Jerks.)

It’ll probably be a long while before I cut out another meat.  It’ll probably be pork, if/when it happens.  In the mean time, I’m trying to up my grain/fruit/vegetable content.  ”Thou Shalt” and all that.

Still…turkey Reubens suck.

“Quoi?” he said.  I knew what the word meant, but even if I didn’t, the meaning was clear: “what the crap did you just say?”.  I sighed and resorted to my old standby; I held three fingers up to the glass.“Paris Visite,” I said.  The man looked as if he wanted to ask me to try again – out of principle more than anything else.  This subway station was the point of entry for flights into Beauvais, which was a smallish town about an hour north of Paris.  A discount airline chose the outlying airport for its service to the city which guaranteed a steady stream of buses filled with European hillbillies and American backpackers flowing into the subway station in front this man’s turnstile.  I felt sorry for him, really.  While Europeans in general demonstrated a wider acceptance of multiple languages, no doubt this man had heard bad French attempted in a staggering number of unintelligible accents.  He looked at my three fingers and relaxed his shoulders in resignation.  He knew I could only want one thing – a three day subway pass.  I slid a twenty Euro note in the slot and he returned the change with a small ticket with a magnetic stripe.

The dirty little secret of the foreign language phrase book industry is that knowing a few words and phrases in another language is often worse than knowing nothing at all when it comes to navigating the country where that language is spoken.  Sure, you may have memorized, “Help, I’m being chased by an angry man with a baguette,” and be able to say it with perfect inflection, but if you find yourself in the situation where you are being pursued by an angry baker, you will unlikely be able to distinguish a passer-by’s “quick, duck into the Virgin Megastore” from “I actually side with the baguette man in this conflict and I will deliver you into his floury hands.”  A phrase book is a false sense of security, at best.

I had just arrived from Portugal where I spoke the language – or so I thought.  It had been five years since leaving Brazil and I discovered that not only had my Portuguese vocabulary degraded considerably, the difference in dialects was incredible.  It was like dropping a Georgian redneck in the middle of Patois-speaking Kingston, Jamaica.  I was deeply disappointed in that I often had to give up the attempt to converse in Portuguese and resorted to English.  I felt like a linguistic failure.  Could I even consider myself bilingual anymore?

In Paris, I stayed dejectedly silent most of the time.  I was in awe of the city with its beautiful architecture and museums, but my interaction with people usually was simply “pardon” or “merci”.  At restaurants or with street vendors a simple, “Anglais?” initiated an English conversation – they being accustomed to foreign tourists.  A Parisian man was able to teach me how to use the washing machines at the laundromat, but it was due more to his impressive ability to instruct through gestures than any verbal comprehension on my part.

For the next couple of days, however, I paid close attention to what people were saying around me.  I got the meaning of some conversations by their context and by picking out Latin roots.  I listened to their accents and rehearsed them to myself.  I always made sure I was relatively alone before attempting, as I was sure that a solitary American man muttering to himself on the street was sure to draw unwanted attention.

My last day in Paris, I decided to make one final attempt at French.  I singled out my victim, which was one of the many snack carts near the Eiffel Tower.  I waited in line, mentally repeating my order.  The cart was manned by two French men who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent.  They seemed unaware of the verbal slaughter that they were about to experience.  I watched them as they worked.  The younger man wasn’t really a man at all.  He was probably only sixteen or so.  Seventeen at most.  Clearly he was the older man’s son, the cart appearing to be a family business.  It was eleven in the morning; shouldn’t the son be in school?  He looked up at me.

“Oui?” he asked and I realized he was asking me what I wanted.  Crap.  I had gotten distracted and had stopped repeating my order in my head.  After a moment of panic, I stepped forward.

“Crêpe Nutella, s’il vous plait.”

Without a word the sixteen-year old poured the batter onto the large griddle.  His motions were without thinking, a result of doing this hundreds, even thousands of times.  He flipped the crepe over and reached for the Nutella.  Clearly he had understood my quick phrase well enough to fill the order without asking a confirmation.  I had done it!  I was grinning with self-satisfaction when he looked up from his work and asked me a question.  In French.  I had no idea what he said and I quickly searched my brain.  What options could there be for a Nutella crepe?  I couldn’t think of anything.  Usually I would just say a simple “d’accord” as saying “okay” probably didn’t matter, but with a lack of obviously related questions, he could be asking me anything.

“How long have you been in France?”

“What are your thoughts on the American war in Iraq.”

“So, are you into bondage play?”

It was too risky; I had to abort.  “Parlez-vous anglais?” I asked.  For the tiniest of moments, he looked confused, as if he didn’t understand my question.  This expression quickly disappeared and a small grin replaced it.  For a moment, it was my turn to be confused until it dawned on me that he thought I spoke French, not just phrasebook French, but honest-to-goodness-I’ve-lived-in-Compiègne-for-ten-years-and-I-just-decided-to-come-to-Paris-for-the-day French. He was confused why a French-speaker was asking him if he spoke English.  Clearly if he had been actually paying attention to what I was saying he wouldn’t have made the mistake, but I didn’t care.  He thought I actually spoke French!

“Anything to drink?” he asked with a slight accent.

“Non,” I replied, smiling.

I have a confession to make.

When I got the first chain email expressing outrage over the portrayal of LDS temple ceremonies in the HBO series “Big Love”, my first reaction was, “well, Mormons, karma sure is a b****, ain’t it?”  After having endured almost half a year of LDS people being (far) less than respectful of gays and their family relationships, I actually felt we were getting what we deserved.

Our goal may have been to stand up for what we knew to be true when we backed Prop 8, but whether we meant to or not, as a people, our actions and words were often laced with arrogance, ignorance, and (even though we constantly denied it) sometimes our speech revealed true hatred.   For a time I thought, with the episode of “Big Love”, we were finally getting a taste of our own medicine.

But then I remembered what that medicine tastes like.

The last six months were incredibly difficult for me.  It was sometimes physically painful to read the words that Mormons, my people, used to describe gays, also my people.  These included everything from “selfish” to the “potential downfall of Western civilization”.  What did the most damage, however, was when Mormons used their own kids against me.  I couldn’t understand how they could say that gays were a threat to children – even dangerous to them.  I simply couldn’t understand how they could say that about me. 

When someone comes out of the closet, they are opening themselves up in a way that leaves them very vulnerable.  They are revealing something that they have kept secret likely for fear of rejection, repulsion, and even hatred.  They are not ashamed of who they are, but it can still be very scary to allow yourself to open yourself up like that.  Thankfully, all the most important people in my life responded with love when I came out less than a year ago.  With the dialog surrounding Prop 8, however, that fear of rejection felt justified for the first time.

Now, I realize that the Mormons are in that position.

The temple is sacred to us, but it is also biggest thing that separates us from the rest of Christianity.  For all of our efforts to finally convince people that we are, in fact, Christians just like everyone else, we still know that it is the temple makes us different.  It is where our religion is raw and it is where we are the most vulnerable.  As I thought about the emotion behind the ill-conceived email, I now believe it to be fear.  We are afraid that the rest of the world will see who we are, temple ceremonies and all, and will reject us.  What makes it worse is that this revealing isn’t happening on our own terms.  We are not ashamed of the temple, nor should we be, but we are scared that when it comes down to it, all the mistrust and animosity that we worry, deep down, people feel against us is real.

I now feel no satisfaction over the “Big Love” episode.  I find no vindication at the possibility of Mormons, my people, being stripped to our most vulnerable then publicly mocked, vilified, and rejected.  The thought makes me very sad.  We are not a perfect people, but we don’t deserve that. 

No one does.

Nope.  We were going under.

I pushed down at the base of the emu’s neck.  The four-and-a-half foot bird braced against the pressure and made a noise that sounded like a broken subwoofer.  I pushed harder.  The emu braced more.  ”Go under!” I commanded and threw most of  my weight onto the bird.  Its legs buckled and I landed on top of it.  I pushed the bird’s head under the fence, moved to the its rear, and gave it a shove.  The bird shifted its legs to absorb my efforts.  ”Move, you stupid bird!” I growled through clenched teeth and I pushed as hard as I could.  The bird slid forward on the pine straw until it was about halfway underneath the fence.  I stopped to catch my breath.  When I came home from school that day, I hadn’t expected to chase the second-largest bird on earth through the woods near my home, but I wasn’t really surprised when I found myself shoving one under a barbed wire fence.

I blamed my parents.

They had both grown up on farms: my mom, over two-thousand miles away in Idaho and my dad, a fifteen minute walk from where I stood.  After meeting and getting married in college, my dad became a civil engineer and my mom, after a couple of decades of raising kids at home, became a fifth grade science teacher.  While they had entered the white-collar world of middle America, their personalities remained rooted in the blue-collar world of American agriculture and their kids would bear the consequences.

It started with chickens.  My dad built a coop behind our house in the Alabama woods and stocked it with about a dozen hens and an aggressive rooster that terrified my 5-year-old self to the very core.  After a couple of chicken iterations that involved stocking, hungry dogs, and fence breaches, the chickens were abandoned.

Enter the ratites.

Ratite means “flightless bird” and I didn’t even know that the word existed until my dad came home towing a trailer containing five rheas.  The birds were smaller, grayer versions of ostriches.  They stood about four-and-a-half foot tall and maintained a confusing expression of surprise and indifference – something I previously hadn’t thought possible.  It was like living in a zoo, until I was informed that I would be the one responsible for feeding them.

Every morning before school and every evening afterward I shuffled down to the pen that my dad had built for them and scooped ratite feed into home-made troughs.  Eggs needed to be gathered as well.  Much like the roosters, the male rheas became aggressive during mating season – which somehow ended up being year round.  A hot-and-bothered rooster was, at most, annoying.  A mating rhea, with its inch-long claws and snake-like hissing, was in a completely different league of sexual frustration than the Foghorn Leghorns that I had previously encountered.  The roosters had never pressed themselves against the fence, sputtering and slashing, and demanding that my intestines be spilled onto the ground.  After a series of experiments involving decoys, posturing, and make-shift shields, the best way discovered to collect eggs (and the way that satisfied my own frustrations) was a well timed blow to the head with a rubber garbage can lid.  This was always seen as self defense and illicited zero animal cruelty guilt.  We eventually acquired more rheas and a couple of emus until the herd grew numbered about fifteen.

One would assume a four-foot fence would be sufficient for containing a four-and-a-half foot bird, but one would be misjudging the bird’s vertical leap.  While not extremely common, it wasn’t unheard of to pull into the driveway after school to find a rhea picking at the grass along the treeline of our front yard.  The bird would have been startled by a low-flying plane or a stray dog and would have run in circles in its pen, pausing briefly to slam against the fence.  Occasionally, one of the birds would jump a little too high, flip over the top, and land dazed on the other side.

This time one of the emus had escaped and was milling about in the woods across the road from the house.  It had somehow crossed the barbed-wire fence unscathed – the fence that it now sat halfway under.  I set my feet and pushed the bird under the rest of the way.  I kept one hand on its back and quickly crawled through the fence to prevent it from escaping, but my caution was unnecessary; it didn’t move.  I tried to coax the bird into standing up.  I needed it to get up so I could lead, well, push it back to its pen, but it kept its legs locked tightly underneath it.  It wasn’t budging.

My parents had probably been trying instill a sense of character or maybe they were teaching me responsibility.  If my years of feeding the birds accomplished all that is still to be decided.  As I stared down at Australian flightless bird stubbornly sitting at my feet, I did learn something that I have carried with me throughout the rest of my life.

Animals are douchebags.

All the years of nature documentaries I had watched as a kid had instilled a sense of respect for animals.  They were part of nature, which was unsullied by the evils of humanity.  Their size and diversity inspired in me a sense of awe.  Sure, they could be difficult at times, but it wasn’t their fault, they were just acting according to instinct, right?  But all that awe and respect were destroyed in an instant by an emu throwing a tantrum.

“Fine,” I said and wrapped my arms around the bird in a strong bear-hug.  I lifted the bird off the ground and started carrying it the last three-hundred yards to the pen.  I only weighed about forty pounds more than it, but I was fueled by frustration and anger.

“Open the gate!” I yelled at my mom.  Surprised by the sight of me carrying an emu like a sack of dog food, she ignored the short tone in my voice and rushed back to the bird pen to have it open and waiting for me.  I dropped the bird unceremoniously onto the ground in the pen.

“It was easier this way,” I said and walked back to the house.