Sick days

I pride myself on not getting sick very often, but this week was an exception. I had to take the entire week off, with a sore throat and lots of congestion. That's the longest I think I have ever stayed home. I have been sicker, but this was a longer duration. Some of it also has to do with the fact that my present job includes interacting with the public all the time, so it's more important for me to stay away.

It all started on Good Friday, when I woke up with a slightly sore throat. No problem, I just figured it was dehydration or a canker sore or something. I feel bad; that was the day I was in the barbershop, touching people all day. I hope I didn't start an epidemic!

On the day before Easter, I wanted to run up Mueller Park, which is just over 3 miles up, 6.5 miles round trip. But when I got just over a mile up, I wasn't feeling very good. My throat and lungs hurt. I might have been able to power through it, but I really had no desire to, which is unusual. So I only went two miles instead of six.

On Easter Sunday, I felt a little worse.

But Easter night, I had to keep drinking water to soothe my sore throat. I had to get up every hour to release the water and blow my nose. And when I woke up on Monday morning, I was just too congested and sore to go to work, so I stayed home.

That pattern continued three more nights. All I felt like doing was watching trashy TV shows. One of my Sundance coworkers wanted me to help out with a book she was working on, so I did work for that while I was home, only to find out at the end of the week that the publishing deal fell through.

As I was sick, I kept thinking, "How do people binge watch stuff when they're healthy?" I just feel so lazy and worthless watching TV all day! I'm sad that I got sick this week, when the weather was so nice.

Monday was Earth Day, and I wanted to do something environmental, but I was in no shape for a run or hike. So I went to the Wild Rose Trail to try to pull up myrtle spurge. That did require physical exertion, but I did it anyway. I feel like I'm hardly making a dent in it. But it's still better than nothing. One couple asked if I considered it a weed; I explained how it was an invasive species that took over the hillside. The woman picked up a piece, but I said, "Oh, don't touch it! This milky stuff can give you a rash." And indeed, I have a tiny bit of rash on my wrist, where my sleeves and gloves didn't cover. So even though I didn't pull much myself, I was able to educate people about it. And I only started doing it because I was educated last year. I should make more time to get rid of it.

The yellow flower on the right is arrowleaf balsamroot, one of my favorite wildflowers. It is tragic that the spurge competes with such a wonderful plant. There were also some vetch plants being crowded out by the spurge.

On Friday, I was finally feeling better, but still not well enough to work. My parents were camping on Antelope Island. On Friday afternoon, I rode with my sister to see them there, my favorite island. We went to the visitor center, but I was in no condition to do anything else.

Saturday was my scheduled day off. I had heard that the original Golden Spike was on display at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, but it was the last weekend there. I wanted to see it, so I did. I was glad to see it, but I was unimpressed with the exhibit. There were absolutely no explanatory signs for the spikes. The spikes have writing on them, but it was too hard to read, and I would have appreciated a caption. The rest of the exhibit was boring black-and-white photographs of the nineteenth century. There were stereoscopes, which are cool, but you can only look at so many. I liked the other museum exhibits better than the one I went to see.

Last night I wanted to try Empire Chinese Kitchen, a relatively new restaurant in North Salt Lake. But the Asian woman "helping" us spoke almost no English. We wanted a combination plate, but she told us we couldn't get what we wanted. She couldn't answer our most basic questions, and we literally did not know what we were getting when we ordered. I feel conflicted. I think it's great that immigrants can come here and get jobs and be successful and share their culture. But if you're running a business, you need to be able to communicate with your customers! I feel super racist, like one of those MAGA types saying "We speak English here!" But it was a frustrating experience. That was my worst experience with a language barrier at an Asian restaurant, but not my only one. If you can't answer my questions, then your menu and sign had better be 100 percent clear.

Oh, and then my mom got food poisoning. I don't plan to go back there.

Easter and a cannon

I had varied experiences at This Is the Place this week. On Monday and Tuesday, it was super rainy, so we closed early. When that happens, I like to go downtown to the Church History Library to do research for a project I'm working on, and on Monday this week, I was in a line behind Paul Reeve, a famous author in the world of Mormon history, who wrote the excellent Religion of a Different Color. But I was too shy and scared to introduce myself.

Then as the sunshine returned this week, This Is the Place was super busy. I gave several field trips. One class only had two students, and another had eight. (The rest had more typical numbers.) I feel conflicted about working there. It really is a mostly relaxing, mostly low-stress job. I don't dread going to work every day, and I enjoy all the quiet time I get, and I even like giving field trip classes. I like hearing the funny things kids say. On Friday, I was in the barbershop, where we put shaving soap on people's faces and then "shave" it off. Some kids wanted their mom to get a shave, but another kid didn't want her to, so when I put the soap on her face, he started crying. One toddler, "who was no more than two," took a look at her sister with soap on her face and said, "Oh no! What happened?" Then she covered her eyes. It was hilariously adorable. A few weeks ago, one kid (probably about three years old) said to me, "Tank you! You're handsome!" as he was leaving.

At the same time, though, I work less than forty hours a week, and it's seasonal, so I get no benefits. I'm a published author working with high school students, and I get less money than I could make working retail. It's way better than retail, because the people who come to the park are there because they want to be. But I can't help but feel vastly overqualified. (Because I am.) And sometimes I feel bad about myself that I can't get a real job.

On special occasions, we fire a nineteenth-century cannon. There's no cannonball, just black powder. On Friday, we were trained to operate the cannon, so all of us new people got to shoot it. I can now add "shot a cannon" to a list of my life's accomplishments. There are various words that must be shouted with each task of shooting the cannon, and I was somewhat inadequate because I literally cannot yell. It is a little intimidating to use such an enormous, noisy, dangerous weapon.

I enjoyed preparing for Easter. It does baffle me that such a wonderful, meaningful holiday gets so much less attention than the holidays of the last quarter of the year, and it seems to become increasingly less popular. Not that it's endangered, it's just shrinking. I mean, I like Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas more than Easter as well, but I wish Easter got more attention. All year long, I look forward to listening to the most adorable Easter albums ever made, but they're like fifty years old. Why isn't there anything more recent?

This year, I'm trying to do new things for holidays, so this year I bought an Easter lily, because we have never had one. It is gorgeous and fragrant. Our poinsettias always die after the holiday, but two years ago I bought a shamrock plant that keeps coming back to life, so we'll see how long this holiday plant lasts.

In 2012, I began counting carrot cake as an Easter dessert, and in 2013, the fad of carrot cake flavors for Easter began. Just this year alone, I have had many carrot cake items made specifically (or presumably) for Easter: Oreos, My Sugar Fix cookies, Crumbl cookies, Normal Ice Cream composed cone, Hostess Donettes, Dove Promises, and maybe some others I'm forgetting.

I'm all for it, because I love carrot cake. But really, it's the carrots that have the Easter connection, not the cake, so I decided to make carrot pie for our family dinner. I found a recipe online. I didn't enjoy it as much as I expected I would, but it was still a perfectly passable pie.

 We did have carrot cake as well.

Today in Sunday School, we read Doctrine and Covenants 19:16–19, and one person commented about the significance of the em dash in verse 18. Not many people know what an em dash is (you probably didn't notice that I used an en dash in my scripture reference), but I do, and I didn't buy his interpretation of the punctuation mark. So I looked it up and found that the original publication used colons instead of em dashes. But I didn't have the heart to invalidate the meaning he found in punctuation.

Living in the past

On Wednesday this week, I felt as though I had left the twenty-first century and stepped back a few decades. It was a combination of things I was doing but also just something in the air.

In the last week and a half, I have been listening to more AM radio rather than FM. I don't usually do AM, so it seems so strange to me. It's like going to a small town, where everything seems a few decades behind the times. The fuzziness of the sound makes it seem dated, and many of the stations play old or obscure music that I have never heard of before. What is this place?

Because of the weather on Wednesday, work at This Is the Place ended early, so I went downtown and was looking at microfilm of the Salt Lake Tribune from 1991. That triggers my very earliest memories. When I walked outside after doing that, my brain was so accustomed to thinking of things as being decades old that it felt like the 1990s. My research was not unusual, but for some reason the strange weather (cloudy and neither winter nor spring) that particular day made me feel like it was a different time.

On Wednesdays, I help tutor youth from a Tongan ward in Sugar House. This week they changed their location, and I found myself in a part of the city I had never seen before. A lot of the stores in the area were local, non-chain stores, like the kind of thing you would find in a small town. One of these stores was a brownie bakery, so I went and got a brownie with a Peep on it.

Then we finally got to go inside this new church building. It's a very nice building and looks relatively new. But all the classrooms were locked inside the building. I have never seen something like that before. It certainly contributed to the feeling of being in another place or time.

I'm not sure what was so unusual about Wednesday. Aside from the tutoring, the day was pretty typical of the rest of the week. But it was a bit surreal.

I don't usually have that happen to me, even though I have been in the past nearly every day of the last seven years, between editing history, dressing up like history, and researching history.

Most of my blog traffic comes from Facebook, so most of you already saw that my book The Saints Abroad arrived this week, though it's not officially released for another month. They gave me five copies, and I already know who is going to receive the four extra copies. (I don't think any of the recipients read this blog, so sorry, you're not one of them.) Though I have had my name in and on other books before, I feel like this is my book more than any other. I did most of the work on this book, and I did more for it than I have any other book (yet). I doubt it will be read much, but still it's out there.

Think Pink

This is an irrelevant picture, but I didn't want the next picture to be the thumbnail preview image.

Back in the fall of 2017, after I had invited my sister and niece to see Lady Gaga, they asked me if I wanted to go see P!nk, since my sister loves her. But the tickets were too expensive, so we saw Katy Perry instead.

Last spring, I saw that P!nk was doing another tour, and since I had previously purchased tickets, I got a presale discount. So I bought four tickets: one for me, one each for my sister and niece as birthday presents, and one extra, because who knows what will change in a year?

So, as the concert was approaching, we invited our cousin April to come with us. My sister sent me this text:

So Wednesday night we headed off to Vivint Smart Home Arena. The show officially started at 7:30, but they had a DJ named KidCutUp playing classic rock/pop/hip-hop while everyone trickled in. Our seats weren't great (we were on the very back row), but it was OK.

The show officially started at 7:30 with Julia Michaels as the opener. My only experience with her is her song "Issues," which I don't much care for. But I really liked her live, and I liked her 90s-esque outfit. Not only is she a singer, she also wrote (or helped to write) many other pop songs, including Selena Gomez's "Bad Liar" and Justin Bieber's "Sorry," and she sang a medley of these songs written for other artists.

Then after another period of time with the DJ, it was P!nk's turn. She rose to fame when I was in junior high, a time when I thought I was too intelligent/sophisticated/nerdy to enjoy pop music. I think of P!nk as an older artist, but my dad had never heard of her.

I recognize P!nk's immense talent, but I don't usually get excited by her music. I never think, "I feel like listening to P!nk today," and I don't look forward to new singles. That's not to say I dislike her, I just don't get excited about her. I really have nothing to criticize about her, aside from her sailor's mouth. (Four and a half years ago, we had our front area remodeled, and the person doing the remodel said he didn't like P!nk's language. Then he was using the exact language he said he didn't like from her.🤷)

She made her stage debut by singing "Get the Party Started" while swinging from a mock chandelier. (That would seem more appropriate for Sia!)

Early in the concert, she sang a song called "Revenge," and before the song, she played a cartoon video of a fictional amusement park called Revengeland. The video showed cartoon characters getting tortured and mutilated. Apparently I don't do well with violence, because it made me physically ill, even though it was only animation. I had to sit down. (Some of that might have had to do with the unhealthy meal of J-Dawgs and Cadbury Chip Cookie that I had just eaten.) That diminished the momentum of my concert experience.

But she really is incredible. She sings just as well live as she does on recordings (unlike Katy Perry). Not only that, but while she's singing, she is dancing and doing all sorts of acrobatics. When I bought tickets, I got free copies of her new album, Beautiful Trauma. My favorite song from the album is "Secrets," and that was the best performance of the night. She had an acrobatic partner, and she was singing while she was swinging around in the air, even hanging upside down. It was spectacular. (You can see a video of it from another concert here.)

My sister said I looked bored the whole time. As I said, her music doesn't excite me that much, but it was a fun concert.

Then I had completely different experiences this weekend.

On Friday, I went to another mission reunion. I'm approaching ten years that I've been home, so these are increasingly less meaningful to me. It was with my second mission president, who I only had for five months. I tend to think this president doesn't remember me, because I was in the far-off area of the mission that whole time. But at the reunion, he said, "The first time I met you, you were much larger than you are now." And then he said, "I seem to remember, it was down in Lewiston, and you were wearing a suit coat that was four times too big." And that's exactly right! So he does remember me! Two of my companions were there, one of whom I hadn't seen since 2012.

I really enjoyed general conference this weekend, even though there weren't any earthshaking announcements, except for the temples. My biggest temple connection is Moses Lake, Washington. That was in my mission! I never served there, but I did have some exchanges and zone conferences there. Nearby Wenatchee would be prettier (I served in East Wenatchee), but I think Moses Lake has more members. (This week at This Is the Place, I had guests from Wenatchee and Spokane!) My grandparents served in Western Samoa, and I remember their mission address stuck to our fridge, in Pago Pago, American Samoa. So I feel a bit of a connection there. And I did visit Tooele (originally spelled Tuilla) last summer as part of my county seat tour, so I feel connected there, even though it could be seen as a rival county. I thought it was funny that President Nelson told people to be quiet during the announcements. I did notice in the last couple of conferences that the vocal reactions were much louder and longer than they used to be. (Before then, the only audible reaction I remember was Rome in 2008.)

A pretty, great state

Back in the 80s, there was a slogan for Utah: "A pretty, great state." Of course, it didn't take long for that to be mocked as "a pretty great state." The creator of the slogan defended it, complaining that people ignored the comma. Comma or no comma, "pretty" and "great" are the most boring adjectives I can possibly think of (except for maybe "good"). This week I got to experience the beauty and splendor of this beautiful, splendid state.

There are people who love to criticize and complain about Utah. If you don't like Utah, then by all means, don't come or live here!

My mom had her spring break, so I headed out with both of my parents to southeastern Utah on Tuesday morning. My mom doesn't hike, so I think they were glad that my dad had a hiking buddy. We visited Arches and Canyonlands National Parks back in 2006, so it's been a while.

First we stopped at Dead Horse Point State Park. Apparently we went there on our 2006 trip, but I don't remember it. My dad and I hiked along one of the rim trails. It was a lovely desert environment, sort of a mini Grand Canyon.

After Dead Horse, we went into Canyonlands National Park. We went on the short, easy hike to Mesa Arch, which was crowded, and with good reason. My mom even went with us. On this hike, I broke my rule about not talking to strangers. I heard a man talking to his family about sandstone and basalt, but he didn't remember how granite formed, so I explained it to him.

We went to various overlooks in the Island in the Sky District. At one of those places, I went on a short (less than two miles round trip) trail run past all the people. It was flat and easy.

Then we spent the night in Moab. I spend a few minutes in Moab back in September, when I was visiting all the county seats, but we spent more time there this time.

On Wednesday morning, we headed into Arches National Park to hike to Delicate Arch. Back in 2006, we saw it from an overlook, but this was my first time going to the arch itself. I was also surprised it was my dad's first time. It was not a difficult hike; the average person could do it, but being in good cardiovascular health helped. Towards the end, I was a little uneasy with the drop-offs, but I do have a real fear of heights and slipping. If I can make it past the "scary" parts, anyone can. We did get a little warm on the hike, and it was the morning in March. I think this would be a terrible hike in the middle of a summer's day—no shade whatsoever.

I had always envisioned Delicate Arch as being on a flat plain, so I was surprised that it was on the edge of a bowl. I didn't like walking on the bowl, but it worked out. Though there are few people in my pictures, there were lots of people at the arch. Delicate Arch symbolizes Utah perhaps more than anything else, and it was great to finally see such an icon for myself. It really is spectacular. Well worth the hike.

'Cause I know that it's Delicate.

I liked the arch's shadow.

We also stopped at the petroglyphs and Wolfe Cabin on the trail. The petroglyphs are between 1650 and 1850 because they have horses.

Next we headed to the trail for Landscape Arch. My dad and I split off to see Tunnel Arch and Pinetree Arch.

Then we headed to the precarious Landscape Arch. My mom made it to this one.

Then we headed to the Windows District. I went on a little trail run by the Turret Arch, North Window, and South Window. There was a primitive trail that I wanted to run on, but it was so primitive that I entirely lost it. I didn't want to get lost or fall off a cliff, so I just turned back the way I came.

I also ran across the street to Double Arch, where I ate a Carrot Cake Clif Bar in the shadow of the arch. I did get a little sunburned from that day's hiking and running.

Near the entrance of the park, I noticed a fault in the rock layers. Then I learned there was a sign pointing it out. I was glad that I noticed it without knowing it was there.

That night I wandered through the stores of Moab with my parents. In one, I found a postcard that matched the shirt I just happened to be wearing.

On Thursday, we went to Newspaper Rock, which had many ancient Native American petroglyphs, including six-toed feet. I think these are totally fascinating. There was some more modern graffiti, but it was more than fifty years old. I find it a little comforting that we seem to be better as a society about valuing these ancient artifacts.

We headed into the Needles District of Canyonlands. My dad and I went on a short hike among potholes, which are depressions in the rock that fill with water and support living creatures. At first, they were all dry, but then we did find plenty of wet ones.

We saw little shrimps in many of the puddles, as well as some swimming insects.

At one point, there was a mom and two kids, and the kids were stepping in the potholes and throwing rocks in them. All throughout the park, there are signs telling you not to touch or disturb the potholes. Were these folks simply uninformed, or were they apathetically and pathetically reckless? I didn't know what to do. After they stopped to marvel at some of the creatures in one of the ponds, I heard them wondering what they were. So I once again broke my rule about not talking to people, and I said to them, "They look like shrimp. But if you put your hands in the water, it can destroy their ecosystem." I hope I was able to educate them. My mom said she saw a ranger get on the trail, so I hope the ranger caught them and educated (or reprimanded) them, because a ranger has more authority than I do.

As we headed back out of the park, I wanted to see an ancient granary on a tiny side trail.

Then we headed to Monticello. We did sealings at that temple, my first time there.

The next morning we drove through Bluff, which was settled by Mormon pioneers who went on the grueling Hole in the Rock expedition. (Not to be confused with Hole N" the Rock, a tourist destination between Moab and Monticello with inexplicable punctuation.) We looked at the Bluff Cemetery.

We went to Goosenecks State Park. My current bucket list is to get to every state park, so I was glad to get this one crossed off. It's not worth a special trip to see it.

Then we headed into Natural Bridges National Monument, which was apparently the first National Park Service area in Utah. I think I liked this monument better than Canyonlands. We went to an overlook of Sipapu Bridge, the world's second-biggest bridge. I didn't think it looked that big from a distance. There appeared to be some small trees that filled a good amount of the space.

Then my dad and I went to hike down to the bottom of the bridge. This hike might be a little strenuous for the average person, and there were several places where they had to make it more accessible. There were three ladders, many handrails, and a metal staircase.

It was fantastic to actually be at the bottom of Sipapu Bridge. It was much bigger up close than it was from a distance. What I thought was a small tree was actually a large tree. It was very impressive.

Then we went to an overlook over some ancient kivas, Horsecollar Ruin. They were amazing, even though I could only see them from a distance.

Then we drove through Capitol Reef. We stopped at the visitor center, and we were going to eat a picnic lunch, but it was too windy. We didn't do anything else, but Capitol Reef is my favorite of Utah's national parks. It has the spectacular sedimentary rocks that the others have, but I also love the petroglyphs and the fruit orchards.

 My rankings of Utah's Mighty 5 are:

1. Capitol Reef
2. Zion
3. Bryce Canyon
4. Arches
5. Canyonlands

On our way home, I wanted to eat at Sunglow Family Restaurant in Bicknell, because as far back as high school I heard they served a pickle pie. It was my half-birthday, which meant that I could eat non-seasonal things without breaking my rules. So we got a sampler of four pies: pinto bean, buttermilk, oatmeal, and pickle.

 The pinto bean was sweet and enjoyable. It tasted very familiar, but I can't place the flavor. 8/10. The buttermilk was like a lemon custard. 7/10. The oatmeal was kind of like an oatmeal cookie; it was my favorite. 9/10. The pickle tasted the most like its namesake, sweet pickles. The texture was similar to a pumpkin pie, and it had a bit of the taste of sweet pickles, yet it still tasted like a pastry. 8/10. I would gladly eat a whole piece of any of them.

It really is great to go out and live an interesting, fulfilling life, rather than just a digital one.

"Nature is nice, but I wish I could take a quiz to find out what kind of donut I am."

Incoherent

I didn't have a super eventful week, so I don't know what to blog about. I have various ideas, but I don't know that I want to make an entire post about any of them. So I'm going to make brief observations about many things.

***
Since I don't have employment-provided insurance, I have to use Healthcare.gov, and I have used agents to help me sign up. This week, I needed to update my income. I was going to have my agent do it, but I logged into my account just to see what information I needed.

Well, the website and system is so messed up that just by me logging in and not even really doing anything, it messed up my application. My agent got quite mad at me because he thought I had opened up a can of worms, but then it wasn't as bad as he initially thought. I find it frustrating that the system is so fragile that I can break things just by looking at it. It's been years, but there are still a lot of kinks to iron out.

Some people want to throw it all out and start over, but that will just bring in a fresh batch of problems. Why don't we just fix what we already have?

***
I tend to be very sentimental, and I remember a lot of things. This makes it hard sometimes to get rid of things. "I remember when I got this on that Thursday five years ago. I don't want to get rid of it!" But I'm trying to get better at not holding on to everything. There's three things that help with that.

(1) Once in a while, I will catch parts of the Hoarders TV show. I don't want to be that. I wouldn't classify myself as a hoarder, but I don't even want to approach that.
(2) Marie Kondo. I haven't even watched her show, but her rhetoric has infiltrated society. I ask myself is something brings me joy, and that helps.
(3) Daughters of Utah Pioneers museums. I've visited several such museums in the last few years, and they tend to be brimming with random nineteenth- (and twentieth-) century items. It's like someone was tidying up and donated the antiques, and the DUP didn't want to say no, but now they have too much stuff. Sometimes I like to hold on to things for their "historical" value: "This item is a relic of 1980s pop culture!" But when I see those museums, I realize that there are already enough artifacts. Too many, even. We don't need to keep them all.

***
As you all know, I take holiday candy very seriously. For each holiday, I have a mental list of what I officially classify as category 1 treats, meaning they are iconic to the holiday. For Easter season, which kicked off this week, category 1 consists of chocolate bunnies, marshmallow chicks (Peeps), jelly beans, carrots, carrot cake, eggs, and chocolate eggs. (This week, I have had carrot cake cookies, carrot cake muffins, carrot cake Dove Promises, Peeps cereal, and Peeps creamer.) Last year was the first time I classified chocolate eggs as category 1, as I kept finding references to chocolate eggs in pop culture and other things. But now I'm trying to define exactly what a chocolate egg is. Does size matter? Does it have to be 3-D egg-shaped, or can it have a flat side? A Cadbury Creme Egg is definitely a chocolate egg. But what about Cadbury Mini Eggs? I say so, mostly because they're so popular at this time of year and they show up in other things. (I don't like the red and green Cadbury balls for Christmas, because they just taste like Easter.) But if Cadbury Mini Eggs are chocolate eggs, then so are M&Ms eggs. Lots of people praise Reese's Eggs (and I agree that they're better than Reese's Cups), but I wouldn't consider those a chocolate egg—they're more like an egg-shaped candy bar, because they are flat. I'm still working out the definition of a "chocolate egg." Yes, this is what I spend my time thinking about.

***
Since I eat too much seasonal candy, I've been looking forward to the snow melting so I can get back on the trails and git rid of my pudginess. (Streets don't beckon me the way trails do.) Well, the snow is mostly gone, but then it's been rainy. And I'll be out of town this week. I just hope I don't miss the glacier lilies before I can finally hit the trails again.

***
This Is the Place resumes officially on Saturday, but I have been there many days in the last few weeks, helping with field trips, trainings, etc. When people ask me if I like it, I tell them, "It would be a great job if I didn't already have a degree." I'm trying to do a better job about enjoying the moment. I ignore most "inspirational" stuff shared on Facebook, but one of them a few months ago pointed out that we shouldn't spend our time at work wishing we were not at work. The pay isn't good, but it is a fun way to spend my days. You know me, I'm a conceited know-it-all, so I like telling people about what I know.

***
It makes me so happy when I wake up in the middle of the night and see my cat sleeping on my bed next to me. When he comes to sit on my lap, I think it's so he can get warm or have physical needs met. But when he sleeps at the head of my bed, he's not getting warm or getting petted. I can only assume it's because he likes to be with me.♥

St. Patrick's Day

Over the last few years, I have come to enjoy St. Patrick's Day more than I used to.

It has always been part of my holiday canon, and when I was a kid, the idea of leprechauns and pots of gold really captured my imagination, and we would always have a green-dyed meal on March 17—rice, potatoes, pizza crust, eggs, etc. I would get mad at Easter stuff before St. Patrick's Day.

I have never quit liking St. Patrick's Day (it is a holiday, after all), but in college, I adopted a bit more cynical of an attitude. Why should we have a holiday that focuses on one specific culture, when we don't really pay attention to any other cultural holidays in the United States? I'm not Irish. (My latest ethnicity estimate has me at 11 percent Ireland and Scotland, and I think the bulk of that is Scotland.) And I abhor drinking. I honestly believe that our world will not get better as long as people turn to alcohol for recreation.

Truer words have never been spoken by an Old Navy ad.

In more recent years, I have come to enjoy and even look forward to it. It has definitely surpassed Valentine's Day in my opinion. I think there's a couple of reasons.

First, I have moved beyond the kitschy leprechauns and food dye to actually doing more in the weeks leading up to Paddy's Day. Don't get me wrong; I love dressing in head-to-toe green, and I have been eating mint-, pistachio-, and lime-flavored foods all month.

But I have made a habit of listening to Irish or Irish-inspired music, reading Irish folk tales, and consuming Irish or Irish American food. I know that a lot of what passes as "Irish" is actually more American than anything (e.g. corned beef and cabbage), but I'm American, and we are celebrating an Irish American holiday, so I am 100 percent OK with Americanized things.

Yesterday (March 16), I didn't attend the St. Patrick's Day, but I stopped at the Siamsa after-party, which had live music from local Irish-inspired bands, Red Branch and Murphy & the Giant. They were on a stage that opened to an outdoor area at the Gallivan Center.

There was a little girl running around, probably between five and seven, who seemed a little...different. As the second band was setting up, she said, "Hey, you guys!" I didn't hear the whole conversation, but I think she asked if they wanted to see her dance. The fiddler said sure, and she did a little kid dance. Then the fiddler made a mistake by saying, "You'll have to dance when we start playing." Then, for the entire time the band was setting up, this girl was walking throughout the stage, behind the curtains, etc.

Once the band started, she was up on the stage doing her weird little dance. She had befriended two other little girls who were also dancing, but at least those two girls appeared to have had some actual Irish dance lessons, and they were not roaming among the band on the stage. Even as the band was playing their set, the weird girl was walking throughout the stage, talking to the drummer while he was playing. Where are this girl's parents?

The normal girls stayed on the side of the stage, but not the weird one.

Then it got weirder. There was an older woman, old enough to have gray hair, who apparently had some mental disability, and she got up on the stage and began "dancing" next to the little girls! But her dancing was more like rhythmic stepping. I felt so uncomfortable with the awkwardness of the whole scene, and I wonder how embarrassed the band was. It was so weird. Oh, and at one point, the weird little girl came out and talked to all of us spectators—I couldn't understand what she said to me, but I think it had something to do with the oversized green T-shirt she had on, and the next thing I knew, she was on the stage again, with her green shirt in her hand (she had a white shirt underneath), and she swung it around and threw it off the stage, as though it was a striptease!

A few years ago at Barnes and Noble, I bought A Treasury of Irish Fairy and Folk Tales, a collection of nineteenth-century folklore, and I have been reading a tale most nights before bed. Irish people get mad if you spell it "Patty's Day" instead of "Paddy's Day," and some of them also get mad that we use four-leaf clovers in the context of Ireland or St. Patrick's Day. I deduced that we Americans used four-leaf clovers because we already had them, and we connected them to shamrocks and the expression "Luck of the Irish." Again, I was fine with this—I'm an American, and in America, we celebrate St. Paddy's (not Patty's) Day with four-leaf clovers.

Well, in this book, I found reference to four-leaf shamrocks guarding against fairy and witch spells. So four-leaf clovers might have an Irish connection after all, even if it isn't as prevalent as we make it.

I think the other thing that has helped me appreciate St. Patrick's Day is having a broader context of American history and American holidays. I haven't really done any research into Ireland or the Irish diaspora, and I have done only minimal St. Patrick's Day research out of curiosity. But just being aware of other contexts has spilled over.

Years ago, the Salt Lake Tribune published an article claiming Utah is the least-Irish state. (Google and Facebook's search algorithms make it very hard to find, so I'm not linking to it here.) Our primary Irish connection is that the Union Pacific Railroad was built by Irish workers, and it was completed at Promontory Summit. It was hard to know about the Irish contribution to America because of where I live.

But now I am more aware of other things: George Washington declaring a St. Patrick's Day, the Irish Potato Famine that sent immigrants to the States, Irish immigrants influencing our Southern accent, Irish regiments in the Civil War. I even helped write a footnote about the Irish Troubles of the 1980s. 

In my lifetime, it seems that St. Patrick's Day has gotten bigger, but it has mostly been the kitsch and drinking that have gotten bigger. Fifty, sixty, seventy years ago, it seems there was more interest in Irish culture in general and in St. Patrick himself, even if you weren't Catholic. Bing Crosby recorded many Irish American songs, but it's hard to imagine a mainstream star doing that today. (Ed Sheeran has a couple of Irish songs, but he's not American.)

Does St. Patrick's Day belong in the twenty-first century? After all, it might be considered a day of cultural appropriation and degrading stereotypes.

But I think it does belong. It wasn't that long ago that the Irish were a persecuted group in America and oppressed in their own land. Current events show that we're still struggling with accepting and embracing people and cultures who are different from us. St. Patrick's Day can show us how it's done.☘