The "G" word...

OK, so you all know that I'm liberalish, and that the liberalish comes from my upbringing in a weirdly configured Mormon-Atheist household, where the main doctrines were the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Ensign; and Nova, Shakespeare, and Nova ScienceNow, respectively.

You also know that I am a faithful member of the LDS church, and that's not going to change. And, the LDS church has a reputation for being slightly homophobic among other communities.

So, you might ask, how does an LDS girl like me come to be a straight ally? How does she reconcile that with her beliefs, and not only with her beliefs, but with her conservative husband and his friends and family that share the same opinions?

Well, I sort of grew up with gay people around me. Literally. When I was a kid, the house just east of ours housed a gay couple. I have fuzzy memories of them, but when you're a kid you don't think anything's strange about the things adults find strange. Mr. Gardner said it the best; when he was a kid growing up in (I think) Chicago, he never noticed skin color. I never thought it was unusual to have two men living together next door. It's not until you're older that those things kind of hit you.

The couple next to us, Bo, and his partner, were some of the nicest people I have memories of. Both of my parents really liked them, and in turn, they really liked us. They really thought I was a fun kid, and they were always really nice to me. They never tried to convert any of us to gayness. In fact, their behavior was really very appropriate. I distinctly remember them giving me a piece of candy one time, and my mom telling me to say thank-you.

In other words, they were just people. And they were good people, at that.

From then on, I have always had gay friends. In high school, the gay people I knew and were friends with were some of the most talented, kindest, funniest, sweetest people I have met anywhere. And they still are! I won't name names, but one of them can dance like nobody else I've ever seen, and he'd never had any dance training before coming to the high school. One of them is the genuinely nicest guy I've ever known, and he should really have attended Westminster because I miss him. One of them never fails to make me smile and lives his own life with verve.

And now, in college, I've made even more gay friends. Air, who I worked with in my professor's office this year, is still one of the funniest, smartest people I've met to date.  And I've made plenty of straight ally friends too, LDS and otherwise.

However, as with any political or social stance, not everyone is bound to agree with you. And that's tough. It really is. The number one political fight Tanner and I have had most often concerns gay marriage. And I've been in disagreements about the issue of gay marriage and couples that really hurt  and upset people on both sides. I don't ever want to judge someone about their own personal and political views, and I seriously hate upsetting people and getting into those disagreements. But I'm not going to just change my views because someone else doesn't like them, and I wouldn't expect others to change their views just because I might not agree with them. It works both ways. I respect you; you respect me. Hopefully, we'll agree to disagree and look past our differences to remain friends.

One of the most relieving things  for me that has happened recently are the LDS "It gets better" videos. One of them was done by students at the church-affiliated school Brigham Young University, and the second was done by just ordinary church members.The growing LDS support and love for the LGBT community really warms my heart.

BYU "It Gets Better":

LDS Members "It gets better:"

If you haven't already, please watch these videos. PLEASE. I don't care if you're liberal or conservative, please watch them.

My job as a human being and as a daughter of God is to love my fellow men and women, whether they are black, white, tan, gay, straight, religious, atheist, liberal, conservative, or purple. I want to be a judgement-free person simply because it's not my place. I don't know the journeys other individuals have been on. I only know my own journey and what's in my own heart, so I'll just try to focus on that and how I can be a better person. Heaven knows I'm not perfect, but I always want to try to be kind, loving, and open-minded.

And if you disagree with anything I've said, please know I still love you and I hope you can look past my views and stay friends with me. If I have offended, it was unintentional.

But my gay friends are people, and they deserve happiness in their lives JUST as much as any straight person. And they deserve to know that God loves them. And, if they don't believe in God, they need to know that I love them, and that lots of other people love them for who they are, and they want them to be happy.

To me, that's elementary.

The Kindness of Strangers at Missionary Farewells

One of the greatest things that has come from knowing Tanner are his friends.

Tanner's missionary farewell back in August was one of the !@#* hardest things I have ever had to go through. I spent the whole day trying to keep my "cool face" on, when really, all I wanted to do was go somewhere, curl up into a ball, and cry my eyes out.

No, really, I'm fine...

"Put on a happy face," they told me. "He'll want to remember you smiling.

Well, that worked until about the ten minutes before I had to leave. He kissed me goodbye, and with that I dissolved into tears.

Luckily for me, a young couple had lost their car keys. Liz, who was one of Tanner's oldest friends, and her husband had attended the farewell, and somehow their car keys had vanished. My mom and I offered to give them a ride home, as it wasn't too far off our own route.

By the time they got in the car, I was a mess. Any semblance of Cool Face had completely and totally vanished, and I was sobbing. Not the polite sobbing, but the ugly, screwed-up face, choking noise kind of sobbing.

So much for happy, pretty face for my missionary to remember. I felt like my heart was being ground into dust because I loved Tanner so much, and missing him seemed unbearable.

Liz and Nephi were pretty calm through my sobbing, even though I felt like a social pariah with all the leakage that was going on on my face. I was usually pretty good about waiting to be alone before I fell apart, but I was just too tired and raw to wait that long.

Anyway, Liz and Nephi were recounting their own "How I Met Your Mother" type story, and the whole time I was crying Liz just kept her hand on my shoulder, even though I'd only just met her a few hours ago. At first, I didn't want anyone to touch me, but after a while, her kindness to me, a practical stranger (not to mention one who was sobbing) made me want to cry even harder.

She always told me that things would work out. Whenever I talked to her because I felt lonely and I didn't know how to handle the ache that came from missing Tanner, she always told me things would work out.

And, she was right. I can't tell you how glad I am that she was right! Tanner is my entire world, and he means more to me than any single thing anywhere. I love him more than I ever thought was possible to love another human being.

I really wouldn't have got through missing Tanner so much without Liz's reassurance. And I don't get to see her nearly enough, so I think it's time that we planned a double date. And, I want to come and play with her baby when it's born. I love babies and I bet Liz's is just going to be the cutest.

I'm still so grateful for Liz and her kindness to me that day. It was a little thing, but it's something I will always remember. She was an angel to me that day.

& that's elementary.

In the desert of life, I found a Rose, who happens to be my best friend.

The title of this post without context sounds ridiculous. Until I explain to you that my best friend's name is Sahara (aka, a desert) and her middle name is Rose.

Now it's awesome.

Sahara and I love to tell everyone that we met as infants, and it actually is completely true. It's not just some made-up story for effect, to show everyone how great of friends we are. We were both born in September of '91, and we met three months later via our parents' Parenting Class. Memories of our early friendship and conversations are a little fuzzy, but I can honestly say that there has never been a time in my life that I have been without Sahara's constant friendship and support. I can't remember a time when she hasn't been there.

In fact, we've been through EVERYTHING together, and I mean everything. We were friends when I was "engaged" in preschool (a supremely boring event for Sahara, because I made her play the daughter and sent her away to take naps, but she still stayed friends with me). We went through a ton of fads together--hating boys, dance classes, being Star Wars geeks, making fun of Romance Novels, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Pride and Prejudice, Bones, High School, and now...College...

We've been nerds for a looooong time. Seriously, if you can name a geeky subculture, like Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Dr. Who, we've probably been part of it at one time or another.

The blessing and the curse of having been friends with someone for so long is that they tend to remember every single stupid thing you've done or said.

 Sahara has a whole pile of dirt on me from the early childhood years. There was the time I was "too grown up for candy," the time I always wanted my character to die when we played our make-believe Lord of the Rings game, and of course, the family favorite, "God and my shoes."

I've heard this story so many times, and I don't even fully remember it happening. I mean, I know what shoes the story is about, so it must be true, but I don't really remember that specific conversation. I'll try to recount it like she'd tell it.

Sahara and I used to take dance classes together, from about when we were 3 or 4 to about 10, I think. This was in the earlier years, so we would have been somewhere in the age range of 4 to 6. As a princess-obsessed only child, I had a doting family that liked to shower me with princess-y gifts of Disney Store (or something similar)  origin. That particular day, I had arrived to the dance-preschool class with gloriously gaudy shoes that had Belle's face on them.

They've gotten fancier since I was a kid. I would have died for these at 5.

Sahara was, of course, immensely impressed and slightly jealous of these masterpieces of...well, descriptive words escape me even now, but not in a good way. FTD? Glitz? We'll go with glitz.

I was as immensely proud of my shoes as Sahara was impressed by them; in fact, in discussion, I declared that they were "perfect."

"Now," Sahara usually says as she recounts this story, "I was taught that only God was perfect, and so I explained this to Hilary. She insisted that her shoes were perfect, while I insisted that only God was perfect.

"There was a bit of a back-and forth about it for a while, when suddenly Hilary exclaimed:

"Well, GOD AND MY SHOES."

"God and my Shoes" is something of a tagline with Sahara's family. I have no idea in what context they use it, but they're all ridiculously smart people and they probably make it fit somehow. When Sahara and I make a mutual friend, this story usually comes up at least once. I have not yet lived down "God and my Shoes," and I probably never will, but I don't mind. Having a best friend of the caliber Sahara is makes up for all and every embarrassing story she has about me.

Some of my personal favorite Sahara stories are:

-the time she asked a bunch of girls (including me) to marry her, because at the time she hated boys, thought they were gross, and didn't want to have to marry one. I don't think one girl said "yes."
-the time when she showed me how lions hug in preschool

-the time she dug a gigantic hole in the dog yard at her parents' house...and I still don't recall exactly why
-how she asked for Kraft Mac and Cheese every time she came over to my house
-climbing every tree we could get our hands on
-physically becoming cats (in our imaginations) with our other friend Erica
-the time we went to California to visit Erica for two weeks, and Sahara had her nose buried in HP6 every spare moment she could get
-every single time we've ever been shopping together.
-math class in high school with our crazy, crazy teacher
-Being cast in the Last Night of Ballyhoo as cousins with a slightly strained relationship (the other best story from that show is the super awkward first stage kiss between Sahara and one of our classmates)
-going to college together, auditioning for Henry V. That was where Sahara met her boyfriend, out in the foyer waiting to audition. They hit it off pretty quickly, and I just sort of sat and watched them talk about everything. I felt like a third wheel already, and they'd only just met. But it became okay because her boyfriend is super super awesome and they are perfectly adorable together.
-drinking tea
-doing Hamlet and Ophelia together at the workshop where I really met Tanner.
-watching her become a cat mom and defending her chubby kitty while playing with its neck flab.
-and, most recently, at my wedding, where I think she cried more than I did, and I seriously loved her for it. Her support of me getting married was so great and it just proved to me (again) that she is a friend of the highest quality.

(I have this thing where I'm really good at crying for irrational reasons, but at really sensitive times I have a hard time crying because I'm afraid to break face, so I end up feeling heartless. Go figure.)

Sahara is THE BEST of the best friends I have. She's basically more like my sister than anything, she knows me inside and out. I cannot imagine my life without her in it. I can only hope that I have done my part and helped her through her life and its ups and downs like she has with mine. Every tragedy and high point in our lives, we've been there and been through it together.

What else can you say to someone whose friendship is irreplaceable? I am so grateful for her, I love her so much, and I will always be there for her. I hope we'll get to that point in our lives where we're 80 and we have so many more hilarious and great stories that we can look back on.

To you, Sahara, The Best Friend.

& that's Elementary.

Girls' Camp and Ticks.

Every year in the summer, the Young Women in the LDS church go camping. It's sort of like Scout Camp, except tamer. There's less...manly stuff. Snipe hunting is still a big thing, but for the most part, there aren't too many pranks (at least not on the one time when I went).

Girls in their 7th and 8th grade years in Utah have the option of not only attending Girls' Camp with their ward in the summer, but attending a second camp called OakCrest. It's a bunch of girls from a bunch of different stakes (ie, church boundaries, not stakes in the ground or steaks) all thrown together to socialize, sing, make fires, cook s'mores, and make boondoggles. All that fun camping bonding stuff.

My awesome cousin Amy is currently working up at OakCrest for the summer. It seems so weird to me that she's old enough to work there, especially since the time I went summer before my 8th grade year, all the camp councilors seemed so old and sophisticated.

From what I could tell, Amy is having a fun time, and I know she'll be a great councilor once the girls start coming up. From the sounds of things, it hasn't changed much from when I was there. There's still a lot of the same activities (archery, zipline, hike) and in theory it sounds like a ton of fun. And, for some people, it really is. I had been hearing the hype about OakCrest from friends in the ward, from friends at school, from EVERYONE.

Amy was back from training today, we were all together for a birthday dinner; and she was telling us all about the experience: The staff, the food, etc. My mom asked me,

"Do you remember much about the food you ate there, when you went? Was it good?"

To which I replied:

"Nope. I sorta blocked that whole trip out of my mind."

My aunt then commented, "I seem to remember you not having the best time when you went."

And I didn't. I am an only child, and I am extremely protective of my mom. She's probably the only person besides Tanner and Sahara who really completely knows me. And at that point, she had recently had a hysterectomy, which scared me more than anything else ever had.

I've always gotten a little homesick; the first few years of Girl Scout camp were ridiculous, Girl's camp with the church wasn't too bad, but OakCrest was miserable. It took me years to stop being homesick. I think the fact that I was mushed in with a bunch of people I didn't know made it worse, but I missed my mom like crazy.

So that was the first contributing factor. The second was, I was deathly afraid of getting a tick.

I don't know why it bothered me so badly. All I knew was, I took every single extra precaution there was available NOT to get a tick. It just sounded so gross, and not only gross, it sounded invasive. I have a distinct memory of someone telling me,

"It'd be about the size of a small watermelon seed, with little wriggling legs. And its head would be under your skin."

Getting a tick was never a threat before. But at OakCrest, for me, getting a tick seemed equivalent to the Zombie Apocalypse. I have no idea why. My imagination has this tendency to take things I'm scared of to the worst possible level, and not let them go until the threat has passed (I once spent a whole summer of my childhood being deathly afraid of zombies because I watched Scooby Doo on Zombie Island. The dumb movie wasn't even that scary; I re-watched it last Halloween with Tanner and I was so surprised how not scary it was. I'm pretty sure my mind made up 90% of the scenes that I remembered and was scared of as a kid.)

I survived the week at camp like a champion wuss. Tick-less, of course, even after spending an entire night sleeping out on a tarp in the middle of a meadow. I did find a spider lurking under my pillow, but that's another story. I shot arrows at a target and did the zipline and most of the things the other girls did, but I was so anxious to go home.

I was so anxious, that by the time I had got home and showered that Saturday, my mom had had to remind me of some wonderful news: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (the book, not the movie) was being released that night at midnight. I was so overjoyed that I promptly took a nap and went to the midnight book release with my mom. So, really, it was a combination of really HATING OakCrest and the pure ecstasy of getting my hands on the next Harry Potter that negated pretty much any memory I have of OakCrest.

Plenty of my friends loved OakCrest. And well they should. I think if circumstances had been different, I would have loved it too.

But that's not the way it worked out. So,

Making Camping Trips better since 2005.

& That's Elementary, dear readers.

Reason no. 1 as to why my husband rocks.

Ok, Ok, I know it's cheesy, but with a title like the one I gifted my blog, you can't expect me NOT to put up some sappy posts now and then. But, I feel like I owe it to the internet community to tell you just why Tanner is so special. I'll start with one reason, shall I?

This is just one of the million and a half reasons why I love Tanner, but it's a pretty big one. PMDD (Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder) runs in the family on my mom's side; basically, if you're a girl, you have a pretty good chance of turning into a raving lunatic once a month. It affects everyone differently; for my mom it was serious anger. For me, serious depression.

I'm currently on the pill (we can't afford to have kids for a while, and besides, it's fun just being together), and that's usually supposed to help with the symptoms of PMS and PMDD. But, for whatever reason, this last book of pills hasn't helped anything. Since about the beginning of May, I've been swinging up and down the mood spectrum like a yo-yo in a lift. One day, I'm perfectly happy, and the next I'm overly sensitive and crying and there isn't anything I can do to stop it. I'm like this awful, leaky, runaway express train of hormones.

It's been hard on Tanner. Heck, it'd be hard on any guy. A lesser man would either a) run for the hills or b) snap and start screaming back. But he's been a real champ about it. He's been patient and loving and (with the exception of a few days) he knows exactly what to do to take care of me. I really hate to impose on him with my craziness, and I am working to do what I can to decrease the Insane. I like being happy with him much better than me crying because of some unknown and irrational reason. And when I'm happy, he feels much happier too. And that's really all the motivation I need to try and be better: I want my husband to be happy. I want to make him happy.

I know full well that I am extremely lucky to have such a great guy as my eternal companion. Not just because he takes care of me when I feel like I should be in a mental institution getting electroshock therapy, but because when I'm happy, he and I can joke about both of our bad days.

I love him all the more for putting up with me. I realize how great and special that makes him, and I really can't express how grateful I am that he is so patient. He really is the best husband in the entire world, and my best friend. I have learned so much about being a better person from him just by watching him interact with other people. He's like who I want to be when I grow up: generous, kind, fearless, loving. That's not to say he's perfect; he isn't. Far from it. He has his bad days, too. He leaves socks all over the house (I picked one out of the recycling bin today) and sometimes he can be a real cranky bear.

His imperfections don't really matter to me, though; in fact, I think I love him more for being not perfect. I know I'm so far from it, that being married to someone perfect would probably cause death from insecurity and inadequacy. So we're two not-perfect people learning to live life together, and I have to say, being married to him is the greatest adventure I have ever been on. I wouldn't trade it for anything. Not an Aston-Martin, not for Chris Hemsworth falling in love with me, not for as much money as the federal deficit now is (something around $13,000,000,000,000?)

Because Tanner is priceless to me. And boy, do I ever love him more than anything. Really.

& That's Elementary.

Hardcore May Term 2011

May Term this year was nothing compared to May Term LAST year. This year's schedule was:

The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde. 9:00-12:00, Tuesday and Thursday.

So lighthearted, right? I mean, yeah, Oscar died of an unknown cause, destitute, after 2 miserable years in prison picking apart material until his fingers bled, but he was at least funny. And stuff. Well, before he went to prison. Even though his death was sad, for the most part we just enjoyed his wit and wisdom.

Last Year's Schedule:

Victorian Murders. 9:00-12:00, Monday and Wednesday.
Genocide: Two Case Studies. 12:00-3:00, Monday and Wednesday.

Last year's May Term was definitely not for the faint of heart. It beat the crap right out of me, so that by the time May had ended, I was not only exhausted, but super depressed. Both the classes were wonderful, and I would recommend them to anyone, but not both in the same term.

Victorian Murders was a blast. It sounds grim, and bits of it really were, but we started off the term with Sherlock and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. We got to watch the old Jeremy Brett TV series, which  to me is the epitome of any Sherlock portrayal. Jeremy (I'm on first name terms with a lot of actors in my head; in case you didn't get that from the Imaginary Dinner party post, I think they're all my friends) is the perfect Sherlock. There isn't anyone that matches up to him. The closest anyone has come is Benedict Cumberbatch, and he's only like one notch below Jeremy Brett in my opinion.

The grim parts came when we talked about Jack the Ripper and how many prostitutes inhabited Victorian London. And how dirty and gross Victorian London was.

We capped off the semester in that class last year with a presentation (Elree was teaching). My group did one on the Victorian Death culture. That was where I was introduced to all kinds of fun stuff: hair jewelry made out of the hair of the deceased, and the dead baby pictures. And mourning customs. If someone died (ie a husband); if you were a woman, you'd basically wear black for the next 20 years of your life and then after that, you could wear light purple with black lace. And then, after that period, if you were still alive, you could wear color.

The dead baby thing nearly killed our group, but not in the way you'd expect. It was so morose and morbid that after the initial shock wore off, it sort of became the running "I'm so going to hell" joke--because you either laughed at it, or you had hysterical attacks of simultaneous disgust and sadness. It got to the point that we were a little worried about laughing up in front of the classroom during the presentation. It really wasn't funny that the babies were dead. It was funny that there were pictures of them. We started thinking up some really ridiculous ways to jazz up the Victorian Dead Baby pictures.

They really are terribly sad and also terribly creepy. And we were really super tired and mentally exhausted. Super tired mentally exhausted college students do not have good coping mechanisms when things are sad and creepy and way eccentric.

The second class was the real downer, though. I don't know what moment of mental instability convinced me that I'd be able to handle the Genocide class without some sort of emotional effect. This coming from a girl that was in shock for weeks after watching a Holocaust documentary, who was in a play about the Holocaust in High School that made her physically ill, and who cried in APUSH from watching the slideshow about WWII when it got to that point in history.

Genocide the class was miserable. It took me about a week to remember why momentous historical tragedies and I don't mix. We watched a movie about the Wansee Protocol, and for me that was the one that hit the hardest. There was no violence or anything like that; it just documented a bunch of German leaders (except Hitler, he asked them to solve the "Jewish Problem" but didn't tell them how, so that he couldn't technically carry the blame for it, which was, forgive me, BULLCRAP) meeting together to decide the fate of an entire ethnic and cultural nation. The way in which they talked about it, so cavalierly, as if they were deciding who was going to mow the grass, made me actually physically ill.

And, it brought up some concerning ethical questions, like: it's so easy to say that if we saw a social injustice or atrocity like the Holocaust going on that we'd do something about it, but would we really if it threatened our family or our own lives? That's one of the reasons why not too many German citizens spoke out, if they at least suspected what was going on--it was safer to be a bystander.

I have to say that learning about genocide like that is important, though--remembering history, in theory, allows us from repeating gigantic mistakes. That's why I took the class; as a world citizen I want to remember what happened to the Jews and the Armenians. It's my duty to learn so I can do my best to keep it from happening again, and NOT be a bystander.

Even though after the class ended, I was so raw that the Auschwitz scene in X-Men: First Class made me cry, shake through the rest of the movie, and then cry again when I got home. I had to spend the rest of the night chilling just so I wouldn't be a wreck. And that was a comic book movie! When I saw Sarah's Key with my friend Kelsey the next fall (again, thinking I'd be fine) I nearly threw up the tomato soup I was eating.

Sometimes, I think I have the memory span of a goldfish. I'm like, "No, no, I'll be fine, I'm desensitized now, it can't possibly still upset me that much..."

I need to write myself a reminder note: YES HILARY IT WILL UPSET YOU THAT MUCH.

May Term last year was rough, but I wouldn't trade it. I made some great friends from it (Johnathan Ford is a big one), I got to talk about Sherlock for part of the term, and I continued to try to be a good world citizen. Oh, and one last thing.

& that's Elementary.

In Defense of Tea.

I like being LDS. There are a lot of great things about being LDS. I got to marry my sweetheart in the temple for time and all eternity, so how could I NOT like being LDS?

The one thing I dislike about being LDS, is not being able to drink tea. I struggle with it almost daily. In our religion, we have something called the Word of Wisdom, which is basically a set of dietary strictures... i.e., no smoking, no alcohol, no coffee, and no tea.

I LOOOOOOOOOVE TEA. I've always had herbal tea on hand, but around high school I started drinking the legitimate stuff. Black tea, green tea, and chai. Chai is my no. one weakness.

Here's the thing (and I sure hope this isn't blasphemy): I feel like the Word of Wisdom is maybe a little outdated when it comes to caffeinated drinks (RedBull and Monster, anyone?). I find sodas much more offensive than teas. I am not a morning person by a mile, and I would love to drink a cup of coffee or a cup of tea to give my brain cells a little jumpstart. No one in their right mind wants to drink Coke or Pepsi with their morning toast.

And, for the record, sodas are much more unhealthy than any tea. High fructose corn syrup, preservatives, chemicals that you could dissolve a dead body in...yep, you're putting that into your body. As opposed to antioxidants, vitamins, and a plethora of good things (that are at least found in tea, I'm not 100% sure about coffee)!

I do drink Coke, and I drink it a lot more frequently now than I used to. I don't like it. I don't like the way it makes my body feel, I don't like the burn that crawls up my spinal cord into my brain from the carbonation, but I'm so caffeine deprived that I just drink it anyway. And I've actually started to enjoy it, which tells me I'm drinking too much of it.

Nothing makes me feel better than a good iced chai in the summer; or a nice warm green tea in the winter. I only survived last May Term with two classes back to back (6 hours of death) because my friend would bring me strong, Armenian black tea. I'll fess up, I didn't feel like I was committing a major sin by drinking tea (maybe I am, I guess I'll find out someday). I felt a lot better when I drank tea than when I drink soda, especially afterward.

My husband in particular discourages the tea-drinking. I have a stash of red tea up in my cupboard, though, and probably some chamomile (both teas have no caffeine and no tannins, so that is my defense). I still do drink chai made from red tea, but I do miss the blunt spiciness of the black tea chai.

I believe in tea. At least, I believe that compared to Coke, it's the smarter option. Heck, it even tastes better than coke (especially the green tea that has spearmint in it--YUM). As for the Word of Wisdom, well, hope springs eternal in my heart. Tea > Other caffeinated drinks like pop.

& That is elementary.