A poem

I know, this is the second post in two days.  Don't judge me.  I miss writing, and this is convenient.
 
I have an old friend who once told me that sometimes, when she had very strong emotions, they usually were best expressed in the form of poetry.  I thought that was ridiculous.  I told her that I always think in prose.  And then those words came back to bite me.

Anyway, this is one of the many poems that have sort of spontaneously written themselves in my head.  It's probably not terribly good, so all of you writing critics out there, feel free to have at it if you want.  Basically, back story wise, I went to the temple on Saturday, and was supposed to meet a bunch of my friends from the old (Sigma Gamma Chi) fraternity days.  I got there at 9:30 thinking we were doing the 10 o'clock session, and then ended up sitting in the chapel for a total of 1.5 hours before the three of us that were actually there went on a much later session.  It was really great, and I don't blame anyone for not being there or anything like that.  I guess I'm just obsessed with heroism, and so I couldn't help but put myself in the place of one of these guys in a Lord of the Rings type story, waiting for those men of his alliances to show up to his aid in the battle against the forces of darkness.  So, anyway, here you go:

Too few are rallied
Too many lost
The battle 'gainst evil's terrible cost
 Naught but the vanguard
of the forces of old
And twice as weary
and half as bold
 Yet, to stand these are gathered
And stand we will
In life and in death
Our duties fulfill
 And hope in the power
That's saved men before
For the light we shall stand
in the strength of the Lord
 

"because of their yielding their hearts..."

(Hel 3:35)

Today, as I left work to go to my parents' house for a quick visit (largely motivated by the Star Wars lunch box that I had shipped to their address), it finally all came crashing down on me.  I left the house before 6 this morning to pick up supplies for a project, had spent virtually all of my free time today (from 7:30 am to 2 pm) coding, and it still was not working right.  Tomorrow I have a homework assignment due, and a test, and another test the next day, and...well, it just doesn't get any better.  Probably won't until May, when the semester's over.  In my mind, I made a very nerdy joke to myself--in engineering, we'd say I'd reached the state of plastic stress.

Let me explain.

No, it takes too long; let me sum up.

For those of you not experienced in strength of materials, first, I'll need to define some terms.  Stress is the internal force within an object, divided by the initial cross sectional area of the object.  Strain is defined as the elongation of an object due to a force, divided by the original length.  These are essentially non-dimensionalized values which are used to define material intrinsic behavior, such as a material's strength, stiffness, and toughness.

Great.  So now you're really bored and have no idea what I'm talking about. 

Basically, for most materials, and especially for metals, the early region of a stress-strain relationship (that is, for low stresses and low strains) is linear, or nearly so.  As stress increases, however, eventually one reaches the material's yield point, where the linear relationship breaks down.  The linear region before the yield point is generally referred to as the elastic region, whereas after the yield point it's called the plastic region.

So what? Well, when you stress a material up to any point before its yield point, it makes no real difference in the long run.  It just snaps right back to its original shape, like a spring, when you release it.  However, as anyone who has played with springs can attest, if you pull it too hard, it just won't ever snap back the same.  That's the way I felt this afternoon-I've dealt with a lot of stress as an engineering student, and I've always managed to snap back once the semester's over without feeling damaged; this evening, though, I felt like there was no way I'd get out of this unscathed.

And that's when it hit me:
See, taking things past their yield point isn't always about breaking them.  When you do take them past that point, whatever stress you've exposed them to effectively becomes their new yield point.  Not only that, but sometimes the shape something comes in isn't the one you need it to be; sometimes the only way to get it to be what you want is forging it into a new shape--taking it well beyond its normal shear strength.

Aren't we all a bit like that?  The shape we're in now isn't exactly the one that it ought to be.  We have character flaws, weaknesses; we all fall short of where our Heavenly Father would have us be.  He wants to help us become more than we are right now, but sometimes that takes pushing us beyond what we would normally think of as our limits, taking us to the point where, like an engineering material, we finally yield to the Hands that would shape us.  It's uncomfortable, but if it wasn't, if we weren't pushed beyond our limits sometimes, then I wonder if like an elastically loaded sample we wouldn't just snap back to exactly who and what we were before the Lord put the stress on us in the first place.  Realizing this didn't really make my situation any less stressful, but it did bring me some degree of peace, knowing that, as always, He is in control.

Might I add a final thought?  The trick with forging and cold working a material to change its strength or shape has to do with understanding its properties.  With people, though, we get to choose some of these.  We get to decide if we'll be like cast iron, which never really yields before it simply snaps, or if we'll be like a soft plastic, ready to bend any which way the instant that any hand is set to us.  I don't think either of these extremes (pure stubbornness, or simply wavering all the time) are the right answer.  Rather, as almost always is the case, steel is a good choice, with a nice balance of the ability to withstand low stresses without damage, and the ability to yield itself to a wise, experienced hand, and be shaped into something useful.

Things as they really are...

This is an older post that I finished, but never posted, on the 31st of Jan.

I suppose I ought not to post so much about the uncertainty I feel about the world...  I'll try to make my next post more positive.

I am growing increasingly concerned about the media I allow myself to view, and/or listen to.  Don't get me wrong--I'm usually pretty good at not watching or listening to things that have sexual or profane content.  I'm worried about more subtle things.  For instance, there's a television show that I had been really enjoying, up until about a week ago.  That's when I started to realize everything that was wrong with it.  Firstly, it was pretty violent, and somewhat graphic in its depictions of the violence.  That's what finally turned me away from it--it just got too bad.  As I thought about it, though, I realized there was an equally large concern that had not triggered the alarm bells that maybe it should have.

The show focused on the life of a man.  A large part of this man's life was a woman.  They had a very loving relationship.  There was nothing graphically sexual or anything like that in the depiction of the relationship, although it was clear that they were, shall we say "involved".  The problem was, although they weren't married, the way they were depicted was exactly like they were.  There was no distinguishable difference between them and a married couple, except for the fact that they were not married.  Essentially, it was as if the show was saying "marriage is unimportant! love is important!"

But it didn't end there!  I brushed that show off as something that I could just no longer watch.  And then, last night, I was watching another show that I enjoyed as well.  In the show, the characters have been torn from their normal life as fairytale characters into our world in the present day.  They are each put in a situation which makes it impossible for them to be happy.  Two of these characters are a princess and her prince charming.  The problem: in our world, charming is married to someone else.  Even though they have no memory of their real life, the two have feelings for each other they can't explain or ignore, but his marriage keeps "getting in the way".  I could justify myself watching the show, though, since this wasn't a main theme, and it certainly wasn't going anywhere dangerous.  Until I was watching it last night.  That's when our princess finally (huzzah!) told the prince that it just couldn't work out between them; after all, he was married, and his wife thought she was pregnant.  Morality!  Until they both realized the wife wasn't pregnant, and the episode ends with the prince and princess (who simply cannot control what they feel for each other, even though they try to avoid each other) kissing in the street.  I mean, marriage only counts if your wife is pregnant, right?

All around us, there are similar lies being told.  These ones were blatant enough and went far enough for me to finally notice them outright, but there are subtler ones that we invite into our homes through music, television, movies, maybe even something as simple as a joke.  They tell us that things we know are wrong are just fine.  The question is, how do you protect your home?  Certainly isolationism is not the answer--we have to be in the world.  So what is?