Heavenly Diplomacy

I have never boiled an egg in my life. It doesn’t strike me as overly complicated; I just haven’t had the occasion to do so. I am not exactly sure how colored eggs became intertwined with Easter, but I’m glad they are. Amazement always struck every Easter morning that the Easter Bunny knew exactly which eggs I had dyed and that they all ended up in my Easter basket.

My idea of Easter back then was fairly simple. A kid can’t go wrong when he’s surrounded by good food and lots of family that loves him. It was always a special day.

As an adult, Easter’s meaning and tradition has changed. For the better part of this decade I had been on a self-imposed “time-out” from God. There was some serious negotiating that needed to be done between us. There was never any open hostility, but I had effectively recalled my ambassador. Thankfully, God never recalls His.

I have to admit that God’s diplomacy is pretty dang effective. To date, I have been the one to make all of the concessions (no surprise there) and I have pretty much given up on my list of demands.

God doesn’t use strong-arm tactics in his negotiating. There are those that masquerade as part of His team that have tried to convince me otherwise. But the older I get, the more I have come to understand that God’s message is simple.

Which is why this Easter morning I am hopeful. It is the ultimate day of thanksgiving and joy. It is the symbolic embodiment of God’s message to us all:

That He gives of His love freely to ALL, no conditions. (Even if I haven’t boiled an egg).

Don't Be Afraid

To my beautiful little sister,

I’ve just spent the past week with you. This is the first time you’ve hosted me. Thank you.

After some terrifyingly honest and revealing discussions, I have one thing to say:

Don’t be afraid.

Fear is a powerful and dreadful emotion. One that is ever pervasive, and as you’ve discovered, will control every aspect of your life.

Don’t be afraid to be alone.

Don’t be afraid to unleash your potential.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Don’t be afraid to admit you don’t know.

I know that you can get through this. It’s going to be hard, but with every step forward you will relinquish your fear little by little.

I have been where you are.

Please don’t be as stubborn as I was.

You are my best friend. I am honored to be your brother and blessed to have you as my sister.

You are better than this. We both know it.

Don’t be afraid.

Love, your big bro,
Nathaniel

The Lost One

Great-Grandma Walton,

I just visited you in your new care-facility. I spent 45 minutes with you. You wont remember though.

At 93, I doubt I’ll remember much either.

I enjoyed our visit very much. Most of your sentences made sense. Some had nothing to do with anything. But that’s all part of the fun.

There are very few details of your life that you can recall. The stories are gone. I doubt you remember your hometown in Kentucky, or how many kids that you have. You weren’t sure who Great-Grandpa Walton was. He’s the man, whose picture is hanging on the wall in your room and your husband of over 60 years.

But no bother.

All that matters now is that you are happy, that you are safe, and that you are not forgotten in your new home.

Your personality still shines through the incoherence though. Your laugh, your southern drawl and those beautifully kind eyes that you can’t see out of anymore are all still there.

It was hard to see you. It was wonderful to see you.

While it’s a challenge to focus on much anymore, please know that you are loved by so many, including me.

I hope you are warm. I hope you are well cared for. I hope you don’t keep trying to escape the building.

You don’t know me anymore . . .

. . . but I know you.

And who knows? Next time I’m in town I may take you up on your offer and we’ll run away together.

It’s never too late for an adventure with a strange man that loves you.

Love,
Nathaniel

Mobility Issues

Scholarship Essay #2

I don’t think that just by looking at me you would assume that I’m all that diverse of a person. I’m a 30 year old, Caucasian male. That’s what people see when they first meet me and I’m ok with that. I’m also gay. I’m ok with that too. In fact the narrative of my life since “coming out” has made me the diverse man that I am today.

I was excommunicated from the LDS Church for falling in love with another man. I was expelled from BYU and had to face my family with the grim news upon my return home to Denver. All of this occurred just four weeks after I came home from serving an LDS mission in Eastern Europe. While that experience was one of the most difficult of my life, it has made me the person I am today and I wouldn’t change a thing.

In Utah, I have the best of both worlds. I can converse as fluently in the culture of the dominant religion in the state as I can in swapping stories with my friends over a beer. To be frank, I love being able to do both. I find tremendous value in being able to relate to others regardless of their backgrounds, to find some common bond, to connect on the human level.

Being a diverse person, to me, is of course shaped by your heritage and your life experiences. But those are inward looking traits of diversity. It is the ability to project an outward embrace for everything and everyone that may come into your life that is the hallmark of a truly diverse person. It is the ability of seeing past the black and white in life and celebrating all the beautiful shades of grey.

A diverse person is someone that truly reflects the attitude of “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” While admittedly I fall short at times, this is a philosophy that I strive to live by. It is within the grey of life that I tend to find the most joy.

It stands to reason that the urban planning program attracted me for just that reason. It is the responsibility of our profession to see our communities as the sum of many parts. To be effective, we must be able to see that the many aspects and needs of responsible, sustainable planning are intricately woven together. The issues that we address are as diverse as the people that populate our towns and cities. We are required to make decisions that have an immediate impact on the parties involved, but also have the awesome responsibility of being able to shape our communities for generations to come. It is difficult to do this wisely when only viewing the world through a black and white lens.

I am excited to be the first planning student from the University of Utah to participate in a study abroad program. As our college diversifies and matures, it is imperative that we reach out on a global scale to experience and build upon the successes that other societies and cultures are enjoying.

I am honored to represent our college and the GLBT community in this pioneering effort. I am confident that we will set the standard with future exchanges in being able to see the many diverse shades of grey.

Scholarship Essay #1

Before the various colored revolutions made their way through much of Eastern Europe, the “singing revolution” set the stage for the collapse of the Soviet Union. The tiny Baltic nation of Lithuania bravely threw off the shackles of nearly 50 years of occupation; not by guns or violence, but by gathering in the tens of thousands around their parliamentary building, joining arms and singing their beautiful national hymns that had previously been outlawed.

I was privileged to live in Lithuania ten years into their newfound independence. Their sense of national pride was still palpable at the time. It was there that I learned firsthand, that it is impossible to repress the human soul. While I had no cultural or familial ties to Lithuania, it was hard not to fall in love with a nation and her people, in whom, the reawakening of a culture and society was occurring.

The sense of national identity is not something easily defined for the crucible that we call America. Yet, for a place like Lithuania, the simple beauty of celebrating their heritage, through everyday life, was breathtaking to behold. I will admit that it took me some time in the region to fully grasp the intricate dynamics that were taking place. I don’t pretend to be able to understand it fully. How can I?

Being aware of their struggle for freedom though, I began to see the world through a different lens. My old thoughts of the superiority of the American “way-of-life,” slowly left me and a deep sense of reverence and respect crept in for things that I once viewed as foreign and inferior.

When the orange revolution swept through Ukraine in the winter of 2004, I was inspired to watch the national awakening of that amazing country. While they have struggled politically to make progress on the orange promises, the nation is alive.

When the parliamentary elections were scheduled for 2007, I knew that I needed to be there. I convinced my father to go with me amidst the general confusion and scorn of our friends and family as to the purpose of the trip.

To be there though, out on the public square with thousands and thousands of Ukrainians, was something that makes me emotional to this day. We talked with them, looked in their eyes and saw the glimmer of hope that comes along with the mantle of a national awakening. It is inspiring and for me borders on the holy.

There is nothing that can substitute for the experience of actually being there, cheering on the similarities in our cultures and celebrating the differences. It is only by seeking out the cultural differences that we grow in appreciation and respect for one’s own.

As the first urban planning student to go abroad for the University of Utah, I will seek out the similarities in Argentina, but more importantly, I will look to harvest the successful differences in their planning approaches. As the saying goes, “Think Global, Act Local” and within this opportunity comes an important first step for the University and our College in becoming a leader in sustainable planning for the future.

My Codependency

So I was feeling pretty good about my green footprint when it came to transportation.  I traded in my ’99 Toyota Tacoma for a ’07 Honda Civic.  I went from getting around 20 mpg in the city to nearly 38 mpg.  I’m only filling up a 10-gallon tank twice a month instead of an 18-gallon tank every week.  The prompting for this came when gas prices were hovering around $4/gallon.  $80 versus almost $300 per month is a no brainer.  Now that gas prices are even less, I feel even better.  That is until I hear the chatter coming from my fellow students and professors in the department of city and metropolitan planning.  For fear of a Monty Pythonesque witch-hunt, I keep the fact that I drive to campus everyday a closely guarded secret.

  I will freely admit that I am completely codependent on my little car.  I drive everywhere.  What will compound the level of consternation even more on behalf of my colleagues is that I literally have a bus stop in front of my house.  I know, I know, the urban planning gods have sealed my fate.  However, I have absolutely no plans of changing my habits anytime soon.  I simply do not live in a walkable area.  I’ve done a brief survey (thanks to Google Maps and UTA’s very cool trip planner) and I have compared walking times, transit times and driving times from my home to various locales that I frequent.  (The gods already know this, but prefer to keep this information stuck in committee somewhere).

Place	Distance	Walking	Transit (transfers)	Driving
Smith’s 2100 S.	1.3 miles	25 min.	18 min. 1 trans.	5 min.
St. Paul’s Church (On Sunday)	3.9 miles	1 hr. 18 min.	49 min. 1 trans.	12 min.
U of U Campus	5.1 miles	1 hr. 45 min.	32 min. 1 trans.	14 min.
24 Hour Fitness	3.2 miles	1 hr. 3 min.	17 min. 0 trans.	9 min.
Tryangles (bar)	3.5 miles	1 hr. 8 min.	31 min. 2 trans.	10 min.

  Walking is totally out of the question.  A bicycle may be a bit more realistic, but I know myself well enough that the convenience of the car still outweighs any other perceived benefit I may attain from utilizing a different mode of transportation.  I think Salt Lake will get there.  I rode the light rail everyday back home in Denver when I went to school, but parking was at a premium downtown, so it was worth it.  Here the costs are low to drive and park, everywhere.  So the question is, for this city studying capitalist pig, how do we provide the proper incentives for people like me to ditch their cars and try something else?

Goodbye Old Friend

I am surprised at the emotional reaction I have had to the announcement that the Rocky Mountain News has shut down. I haven’t lived in Denver for over six years, but I read the Rocky online everyday. Along with the other major daily in town, the Denver Post, the Rocky was the way that I stayed connected to my hometown. While the Rocky was known as the more “conservative” paper, I appreciated that I would get fair reporting and thoughtful editorials. I may be a little biased since I was a paperboy for the Rocky in my youth. I think my feelings go deeper than that.

When it comes to print journalism, I was lucky enough to grow up in a place where the integrity, ethics and truthfulness were never called into question. Aside from the editorial page, with which we are welcomed to agree or disagree, most people in Denver take newspaper stories at face value. I can think of few print equivalents to Bill O’Reilly.

Print journalism has a long tradition of being ethical. Its entire existence relies on the public’s trust. While tabloid rags sell well, few people really expect to find any semblance of truth written amongst their pages. No, for things of import and substance, people turn to the written word.

The problem for traditional print journalism is that their business model hasn’t evolved quickly enough. I suspect that more and more people are like me. I enjoy my cup of coffee in the morning while perusing the online versions of the newspapers, rather than thumbing through pages of their paper versions. I read the online versions just as methodically and deliberately. I have a very set pattern of the order of news that I read. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is the medium.

I don’t have any brilliant suggestions for how to solve the issues facing the newspaper industry. I only know, now, what it feels like to have one of them collapse. It’s not unlike a family member dying. The Rocky connected us to what was happening in our community. It helped to foster debate and dialogue about those events. It facilitated a common experience between citizens simply by reading the same story.

The writing is on the wall for many traditional newspapers across the country. Even here in Utah, the owners of the Deseret News are quietly transforming their paper into a publication that is solely focused on the predominant religion of this state. This move effectively leaves the citizens trusting and hoping that the Salt Lake Tribune will honor the public trust as the last daily voice of professional print journalism in town.

I’m not sure how long I will leave the link to the Rocky Mountain News as a bookmark on my browser. I checked it again this morning like I usually do, only to find, to my dismay, no updated content. So I guess this is goodbye to my Rocky. Thanks for being such a trusted friend . . .

The Snipe Hunt

I am a son of the West. Born on the genesis of the plains, in the shadows of rocky giants, I had the best of both worlds. One of the rituals of experiencing the outdoors in the West involves a pillowcase, a flashlight, a heavy jacket and at least a medium dose of gullibility. Why anyone would believe that a roadrunner-like bird would dash into your pillowcase because it was enticed by the light of a torch is beyond me. (Some versions of the hunt include an equally gullible partner banging on a pot with a wooden spoon).

For the perpetrated, this rite of passage certainly leaves them with trust issues for at least 24 hours, after the realization that the car that dropped them off in the wilderness has fled and probably wont be back for a few hours. For the perpetrators, there are lots of snickers and plenty of material for healthy teasing in years to come. I will admit that I have participated on both ends of this event.

After the fear of death-by-coyote has passed and you’ve stumbled your way back to the road, there isn’t much else to do but walk and listen. You finally realize that you can actually see more when you are brave enough to turn off your flashlight, and if your lucky enough to think about it, you look up and for the first time in your life you can see the milky way as people have been seeing it for millennia.

When your ride finally does come rumbling up the road, blinding you with its headlights, you leave a little bit of youthful naïveté behind with an appreciation for how wide-open the world is and that it is filled with quasi-jerks (like the ones who sent you on the hunt in the first place).

The discovery of that wide-open world is chronicled brilliantly in Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. The book records his deeply intuitive relationship with nature as he travels back and forth between the big city and his property in the woods of Wisconsin. Leopold’s attention to nature’s detail and complex dynamics are so beautifully described in his prose that you can’t help but be transported into his world and to fancifully imagine his vivid descriptions:

The Geese Return

ONE SWALLOW does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.

A cardinal, whistling spring to a thaw but later finding himself mistaken, can retrieve his error by resuming his winter silence. A chipmunk, emerging for a sunbath but finding a blizzard, has only to go back to bed. But a migrating goose, staking two hundred miles of black night on the chance of finding a hole in the lake, has no easy chance for retreat. His arrival carries the conviction of a prophet who has burned his bridges.

A March morning is only as drab as he who walks in it without a glance skyward, ear cocked for geese. I once knew an educated lady, banded by Phi Beta Kappa, who told me that she had never heard or seen the geese that twice a year proclaim the revolving seasons to her well-insulated roof. Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers. (19-20)

I often wonder how many of us that live in urban environments miss the call of the geese? How many are content to see the colors of the autumn leaves on the television rather than to see their splendor first hand? I would posit that those of us that consider ourselves urbane notice the rhythm of the year in a different way. The urban way. The planting of gardens, the mowing of the lawns, the raking of the leaves and the shoveling of snow are about as close as we get to nature anymore.

I’m not complaining though. The more refined a person may become, the more fun it is to take them snipe hunting come spring . . .

Tree Carvings

            I think for most of us that have grown up in the Intermountain West have a special relationship with nature.  We all have a place in our past that was special to us.  A place that we loved visiting.  A place that we can still see vividly in our mind’s eye today.

 

            Stop and think for a minute.

 

            Can you see it?

 

            Maybe your eyes just closed for a minute, or, if you’re like me, your eyes relax and you focus straight through the computer screen. 

 

            But I know you see your place.

 

            Perhaps your place was somewhere close growing up like your backyard, or a field in your neighborhood where you went exploring.

 

            Maybe it was a little farther like a relative’s farm, a favorite park, or a lake where you could skip stones.

 

            My place was somewhere I visited for exactly four days each summer as a boy.  It is a place where I was safe.  Somewhere that I could be myself and be rid of my fear.  To be surrounded by people and alone with God.

 

            My place is Twin Peaks Bible Camp nestled outside of the tiny town of Collbran in Western Colorado.  The camp was run by my Great Aunt and Uncle whom I knew loved me and watched out for me.  I spent six summers in a row as a camper.

 

            Throughout the other 361 days of the year, camp was something I literally dreamt about.  In my dreams I could taste the spring water coming out of the four copper pipes that served as our ever flowing fountain.  I could feel myself wiping off the fine dirt of the tetherball court after tripping on the exposed aspen roots.  I could hear the songs being sung and the prayers being said in the chapel.  And I could smell the wonderful food that was being prepared for all our hungry mouths, three-times a day.

 

            I don’t often think about camp as an adult, or realize what an influence it had on my life.  I can see camp in my mind just as clearly today as when I would leap from my Dad’s truck and go bounding off to reunite with family and friends I hadn’t seen in a year.

 

            While most of the names and faces have now faded from memory, the place, the setting is still there. 

 

            Over by the firewood pile, just up from the chapel, three aspens grow.  On the trunk of the tree closest to the pile, are my initials, carved by an 11 year-old boy. 

           

            And 19 years later, that boy, deep inside, can revisit those trees with a smile on his face and a fond memory of a place that he so loved.

Resistance Is Futile

In the quietest and most remote, secret places in my mind, I often wondered if what I was doing on my mission for the LDS Church was ethical. An excommunication and a decade later, I still am timid about bringing this topic up for fear of terrifically offending people. If I do, forgive me, but try and follow my logic and set aside your pathos for the subject matter.

Where is the line between faith and ethics? Is having a prescribed set of beliefs enough to try and convince other people that they are wrong in the way they are living their lives? Is it ethical to try and change centuries of local culture, language, religion and beliefs on one’s own belief that you hold The truth?

Christianity’s history is rife with horrible atrocities committed in the name of God. The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the forced conversion of the Native North and South Americans are all classic examples of people that most likely believed they were called of the Christian God to do His will. Looking back can we say that what they did was ethical? Probably not.

Think of the story of Robin Hood (either the Disney version or the one with Kevin Costner and his striking English accent). At the end of both, King Richard returns to his throne and blesses the marriage of Robin and Marian. But where did the King return from? He was off fighting the crusades, capturing the holy city of Jerusalem and slaughtering every Muslim in his way to do so. Because Western Civilization is so firmly rooted in Christianity we don’t even blink at the thought that King Richard’s war was not an ethical one.

Now, am I comparing to what I did while I was on my mission to the Crusades? Of course not. No one was put to death if they slammed the door in my face. In fact, the only people I ever thought about threatening with their lives were my companions (and only then for making me wake up to study Russian). No, LDS missionaries have moved beyond war tactics and instead are trained in sales tactics. Many of them are very good at it. While I believed that I was called of God to be in the Baltics and Belarus to preach the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, the ethical line for me came in co-opting entire lives. There was no such thing as the Lithuanian LDS Church or the Estonian LDS Church. It was and is all one church and that church is dominated by a quirky little place called Utah.

If you’ve ever traveled to the bordering states of Utah, you know that the Utah culture pretty much ends at the state line (SE Idaho excepted). Try translating that culture of religion into a foreign country and you are met with little success.

My biggest problem was watching these countries that I loved so much, struggle back on their feet after 70 years of Soviet occupation. When I got there they had 10 years under their belts of independence. One decade is not enough to revive a language, or a culture. But there we were all the same, trying to convince them that their ENTIRE existence was futile. That in the end, it meant nothing if they didn’t listen to us.

I sat on a bench with a Russian professor in downtown Vilnius and he wisely pointed out to me that the Russians could not accept another failure. They had just lost their lands, their political ideology, their leaders, in fact their entire way of life for three generations. It would simply have been too much for them to accept that their religion had failed them too.

To which I asked him if he had ever heard of the Borg . . .

Bug Bites

Apparently bugs only bite me when I don’t have insurance.  The past 48 hours I have been hobbling around the house and campus with a swollen, red leg caused by a spider bite.  The venom of the bite made my leg tremendously tender to the touch, but worse in my estimation, gave me a fever of over 100.  All of my family and good friends have urged me to go to the doctor to get it checked out.  Normally I would, but I haven’t had health insurance since I left my job last April.

I’m reflecting on this for the first time because I assumed that nothing would happen.  I find great irony in the fact that I am legally required to insure my vehicle in order to operate it on the roads here in Utah.  Along with my car insurance, I have renter’s insurance to cover my “things” where I live.  I have no problem buying traveler’s insurance to cover any changes that may occur on a trip.  But, when I look at the cost of insuring myself, I’ve decided to pass.

I suppose I should know better.  The last time I didn’t have health insurance was when I was on a mission for the LDS Church.  I’m not sure what the critter was, but I was bitten in the forests of Latvia and ended up with viral Meningitis.  That had me laid up for three weeks.  (If you ever want a real thrill, try getting a spinal tap in an old Soviet hospital).  I saw the bill on that hospital stay and I could have purchased a few new Skoda’s or Peugeot’s with the amount that was charged.

Why is it that I have to purchase insurance for my car and I’m not required to purchase for my body?  It seems to me that our priorities in this state and in this nation are askew.  Tacking on $1600 a year for insurance sounds reasonable to most, but for a poor college student, that is not an insignificant amount.  At my previous employer, the total for the year was only $650 for a single person.

It seems to create the have’s and have not’s.  I’m a single person so $1600 is the lowest dollar amount available to students.  Thank God I don’t have a family or I wouldn’t even be able to think about purchasing insurance.

In the end I’ll probably just ride this spider bite out.  If it get’s worse then I’ll think about getting it checked out and passing on the costs to those of you that can afford to have health insurance.

In a Tiny Little Mountain Town

When I was 12 years old, for some reason I remember the statewide vote held to allow small-stakes gambling in the three historic mining towns of Central City, Blackhawk and Cripple Creek, CO.  I don’t recall the size of the victory, but having approved the state Lotto a few years earlier, Coloradoans seemed to want to travel to the hills to try their luck at penny slots and $5 blackjack hands.

This was all under the virtuous guise of helping to save the towns’ economies and restore the historic mining buildings.  As a third grader, everyone in the Jefferson County school district took a field trip to Central City to tour an old gold mine and explore the historic district of a town that almost became our state capitol.  Central City was one of three finalists along with Golden and Denver and lost in a squeaker to the “Queen City of the Plains”.

            I have some personal family connection with Central City.  My great-grandfather was the first person in the county with a pilot’s license and was the first to offer flying lessons.  My grandmother was elected Gilpin County Clerk and was forced to resign under suspicion of embezzling.  It seems the Wild West mining mentality of those towns never dies.

             It was under the auspices of the old mining days that we explored the town as 9 year-olds and from what I can remember it was a bunch of run-down, old buildings with mom and pop shops.

            Fast-forward 17 years later.  I hadn’t stepped foot in Central City or Blackhawk since my field trip as a child.  I was there to celebrate my mother’s 50^th birthday.  As I drove up the new highway and entered Central City, I was pleasantly surprised to see the massive historical restoration of the town.  All of the buildings are in pristine condition and it isn’t hard to imagine that with the exception of the automobile, this was pretty much what the city looked like back in the 1860’s gold rush era.

            Blackhawk was a different matter.  Their town fathers have really seized on the gambling revenues and, while they have restored their historic district as well, they have encouraged new and very modern casino growth on the outskirts to the South of the town.  As I pulled into our nice new casino for the weekend, I was shocked to see the elevator cores of a new 33-story Ameristar Casino being built across the street.  While that may seem unremarkable to some consider that the LDS Church office building in Salt Lake City has 28 stories and that the population of Blackhawk is 118 people.

            In my estimation the civic leaders of both Central City and Cripple Creek have kept to the spirit of what small-stakes gambling brought to their communities by not letting it completely destroy the history and overall aesthetics of their towns.  Blackhawk has sold it’s soul to the developers with the argument that there is not a “historic preservation zone” within their city set up by their planners and that they have every right encourage as much growth and tax revenue as possible.

            This past November, Coloradoans went back to the polls and approved a constitutional amendment, bank-rolled by the casino industry, to raise the legal betting limits from $5 to $100, stay open 24-hours a day, and introduce the games of roulette and craps.  This will only embolden the bigger names in the casino industry to enter the market and develop further tracts of land in these tiny mountain towns.  Worse yet, is the thought that Central City and Cripple Creek will be forced to acquiesce to the loss of gambling revenue from Blackhawk and open their towns to the utter destruction of their historic characters and souls.

            I’m ashamed to admit, but I will probably head up the hill next time I’m in town and try my hand at the new gambling limits.  Logic tells me that with the larger limits I should be able to win back my previous losses 20x faster this time around.  

Divorce

This is the first in a series that hopefully will last all semester.  I'm taking an urban planning ethics class and we are required to write two journal entries per week on ethics.  Sometimes it will deal with urban planning and sometimes it wont.  Here is my first entry:

I’m not exactly sure what the ethics around gay marriage are.  All I know is that I’m caught smack dab in the middle of it.  Before the whole gay marriage debate started raging here in the States, my ex and I flew up to Toronto in May of 2004 and were married.  The catchword there is ex.  We were together for just over four years and, like many relationships, it just stopped working.  Our split was an amicable one.  We had to deal with all of the regular issues of a divorce.  Who got the house, the dog, the dishes, etc.?  The problem is, we’re technically still married.

Canadian law allows for foreigners to be married after being in their country for 48 hours.  To get a divorce however, at least one of you has to reside in Canada for 12 consecutive months.  In their rush to pass equal rights legislation they apparently didn’t think that any of the gay marriages would fail.

We’ve been apart now for three years and while this issue doesn’t keep me up at night, it is certainly in the back of my mind.  My friends and family tell me not to worry about it since it’s not recognized in the U.S. and certainly not in Utah, but I don’t think it’s that easy.  We as a GLBT community have been galvanized more and more into activism for marriage or civil union rights.  I support this movement wholeheartedly.  But what does this mean for me then?

Should I just turn a blind eye to the marriage certificate I have tucked away in my desk?  Should I make the effort to move to Canada after graduation and accept my penance? (Actually, Canada would be a great place to work and live I think)  What happens if, we as a society reach the tipping point and some form of gay marriage is legalized?  All of a sudden I’m legally married here.  I actually still consider myself legally married regardless.

Does that mean that when I go on a date I’m cheating?  If I were to get married to woman here or to a man in the future does that mean I’m a bigamist?

These are all very new questions that I am still sorting out within my own personal ethics and society is grappling with as a whole.

For now though, I’m just keeping my head down while I finish school and I’m quietly learning the Canadian national anthem.