On a Slightly Serious Note

I like to fish. Whether it’s threading a worm down a sharp, barbed hook or tying a tiny knot to a rooster tail, I like it. Diana and I went to Blue Lake in the La Sal National Forest this week to do a little angling. After inching down rocky forest service roads, we found ourselves at a small, clear lake brimming with hungry trout. They were jumping like crazy, ignorant that a couple of their friends would be my dinner.  I tied my line and tried a few lures, but they weren’t biting on anything, so I thought I would try something new, a marabou jig. I hadn’t ever used one, but I knew I had to make it dance up and down, so I thought I would give it a shot. I put out my line, started bobbing the lure about once a second and BAM! A bite! Ten minutes later I had two fish in my hot little hands—dinner.

Blue Lake

I am not a hunter, not even a good fisherman, so killing things is a little tough for me. Usually I just let the fish suffocate on the ground or knock them out, but we needed to eat them soon, so I had to kill them quickly. I used a technique that involved stabbing them in the “iky spot”, which is behind the eye, leading to the brain.  I took out my long fishing knife, got ready, but then had something of an epiphany. I felt bad killing another animal. I know it’s ok, God put animals on the earth for us to eat, but I was the one taking its life, I was in charge of this creature’s fate. It felt like the moment needed to be reverenced, that the fish deserved respect. Fish don’t feel pain like we do, their existence has little to no pleasures, and they live to be eaten, either by us or another animal, but I still felt like I should give my respect to it and nature. This led me to ponder other religions’ beliefs on animal slaughter.

Jewish dietary laws, or kashrut, state that animals need to be slaughtered in a certain way, by a pious person known as a shochet. The shochet is a person of Jewish faith, good character, and is often the rabbi in smaller communities. The knife used must be razor sharp and the animal must be bled first with a single clean slit to the throat, causing unconsciousness quickly and killing it humanely. These and other regulations make the meat kosher.

While not one of the five pillars of Islam, halal is the Islamic code of health similar to the kashrut. The halal method of slaughtering is called dhahiba and is the same as the Jewish form of slaughter; the only difference is that a prayer to Allah needs to be said at the time of killing. The method is controversial; many animal rights activists say that it isn’t as painless as they say. Studies have been done, but a clear consensus hasn’t been reached.  

It’s a little ironic that I thought of this as I was killing a fish because in both kashrut and halal laws, fish are excluded. Although I ended up killing the fish and eating them, I tried to do so respectfully and reverently. Even though there is a lot of controversy surrounding the Jewish and Islamic methods of slaughter, I commend them for their traditions and reverence towards nature.

To Save or Not to Save?

Thanks Mom and Dad!

I was driving around the other day and my attention was drawn to the little sticker in the upper left hand corner of my windshield. You know, the yellowish sun stained sticker that one that no one pays attention to until your car is 3,000 miles overdue for an oil change. So since we are going on a couple trips this week and both the mileage and the date on the sticker were embarrassingly far-gone, I figured I should get my oil changed. As a poor, starving, impoverished college student I thought I would save a couple bucks by doing it myself, so I did a little research on how to do it and how much money I would save. The following is a list of products I would need and conservative prices:

1 Oil Filter: $5.00

4 Quarts of Oil: $16.00 (at $4.00 per bottle)

Crappy Pan: $1.00 at DI

Finding a Way to Dispose of Old Oil: Sucky

Probably an Oil Filter Wrench: $10.00 on Amazon

So the total comes to a conservative $32.00. Of course I could reuse the oil filter wrench, so eventually it would pay for itself, the pan too, so let's say around $25.00. Jiffy Lube offers the service for around $30.00, and then I can get a $7.00 discount for being a student, so $23.00 total.

Let’s recap, this is what would happen if I did it myself: I would get dirty, I would have to get parts, and I would be saving negative $2.00, sounds pretty undesirable. Then I said to myself, “Wait a minute Jordan, don’t you want to have a more intimate relationship with your vehicle? Dont you want to know what's being put into your wonderful Honda CRV? And aren’t you tired of telling them you’ll wait until next time to change the gross air filter?” But then I reasoned with myself by saying, “I have a great relationship with my wife, but when she has a problem under the hood, I send her to the gynecologist, I don’t look it up on youtube and learn how to fix it. Why is the car any different?” That seemed to shut myself up because I received no rebuttal, which means I am going to Jiffy Lube.

Marriage, Bellies, and Babies

This picture makes me feel awkward.

I have discovered that there are four types of students at BYU: single, married, pregnant married, and married with children. They all have distinct views on life, school, and the other groups. I fall into the second, and happiest group—married. We have all the benefits of cheaper housing (just barely), government grants, sex, and we don’t have a child so we can do whatever we want whenever we want. So when someone gets married, they are banished from the sect of single people and forever become the weird married friend. And every time the single friends do see you all they can think about is the fact that you are married. You get the question, “So… how’s married life?” and you know what they’re really asking: "How's that forbidden fruit?" One of these times I’m just going to call them out on it and say that it’s great, but kind of messy and more work than you’d think.

Married people get along well with married people with children. It quells the baby hunger to play with a baby that isn’t yours. It’s always been my favorite thing to make faces at babies behind peoples’ backs in church. I love the myriad of reactions I get. There’s the happy, trusting baby who smiles and hides in their mom’s shoulder, then there’s the intellectual baby who just stares, unimpressed. I feel like those ones are studying me, saying in their head, “What a blooming fool, does he think I like to be patronized?” And then there’s the horrified baby who thinks I’m going to eat him. That’s when I pretend I’m asleep so the parents don’t turn around and see that I am the reason their baby hates church.

Pregnant married people are much stranger than married with children people. I don’t think they realize that people who aren’t familiar with the female gestation period have no idea what “33 weeks along” really means. I know that it takes about 9 months for a human to make a baby, and 2 years if you are an elephant, but I don’t want to divide the weeks by 4. When my wife gets pregnant, I am sure I will understand the nuances of the different stages and in what week certain junk happens, but right now, I have no idea. We don’t measure things in tiny quantities in other facets of life, why in pregnancy? When people ask me how much longer I will be in school, I say a little less than 2 years, not 98 weeks, or a little under 60 million seconds.

Well since this is my first post. I will make it interactive. You should leave a comment about your favorite interaction with somebody who belongs to a different one of these groups that was really awkward or foreign to you. My buddy Trevor came over to give me something one morning and while he was there Diana came out of the bedroom and said hi to us. Trevor and I have known each other forever, but I think it was hammered home that morning that I was married now, because he looked extremely uncomfortable. We just laughed about it. Well I will try to post something once every 168 hours, so be prepared for some awesomeness.