I'm Back

How many passwords do you have? I have been locked out of my own blog. I hacked my way back in. Now I can talk to myself whenever I want.

My latest Deseret News column is posted now.

Last week I wrote this column below for the Deseret News. My family and several smart friends said it would be a bad idea to send it in, in part, because so many people seem to take my writing so seriously. So, I decided to sneak out here and post it here because there are only 22 of you out there and I haven't made a post in 100 years. No one will ever see it. And yet I worked hard on it so I figured I should post it.

I hope it doesn't offend you. I mean no disrespect. If you aren't LDS, it won't make any sense anyway.

Recently I saw General Conference, the semi-annual meeting that draws members from the Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-day Saints each spring and fall to Salt Lake City.

I listened to the talks given and found great inspiration in the words offered. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to draft a talk for such an important meeting and I expect a lot of prayers are invested in the preparation of what is shared.

However, sometimes I wait in vain for the general authorities to say some of the things I think really should be emphasized over the pulpit. That’s why I’ve decided to draft my own talk and offer it up to any general authority who would like to borrow parts or all of it for conference in October later this year. Here’s what I came up with:

My dear brothers and sisters what a glorious fall morning it is here in Salt Lake City. It is wonderful to be gathered with you in this lovely conference center and to be connected with faithful saints across the globe via satellite hook up.

Before I get underway, I have a surprise for you. I’d like to ask those of you seated in the conference center to look under your seats. The faithful saint on level 2, section G, row 12, seat 42 should find a gift certificate to The Pie Pizzaria for a Stromboli Pizza. As you know, The Pie Pizzaria makes pizza from heaven and we encourage all members to take advantage of the joy and peace it can bring into your life.

Now a word about celery. It’s come our attention that there are growing numbers of Saints who have been introducing celery, carrots and broccoli into the offerings when treats are promised after a fireside or service project. Such foods can be delicious and tasty when eaten in moderation with a good dip but we caution you against referring to them as “treats.” Remember when someone loses integrity if often goes away just one little step at a time.

And now a word about priorities. In our hectic day-to-day lives sometime work, church and family commitments can become overwhelming. Each has its place and are an important part of our test here on earth. May I caution you against letting such things crowd out all your TV time? When I hear of members who do not have a favorite TV show or those who say they only watch the History Channel I grow concerned. If you have invested in a nice flat-screen television, as I have repeatedly advised, you ought not to neglect it, for to do so would be just a waste of money.

And now I need to speak with the sisters for a moment. We know many of you are good and righteous women who do your best to raise great families and to give your husbands back rubs. However, some of the brethren have reported that their wives are reluctant to let them purchase iPads, saying that the family budget will not support such “toys.”

May I remind you that the scriptures may be loaded into iPads and that with such sacred words in them, they become an indispensable tool the brothers need if they are to lead in righteousness? Please be supportive of their efforts to purchase iPads and other gadgets they need to manage in these last days.

Speaking of the last days, the youth of the church are an amazing and wonderful generation that have been saved for these times. We believe that in addition to them standing tall for righteousness, they should also be mowing the lawn, sweeping out the garage and using their hard-earned money to purchase gifts for their parents. What a special generation these young people are!

And finally, may I say a few words about vacations. As we save for missions, college and food storage may I remind you of the importance of saving for splendid get-a-ways. The need to take time out to ponder on the beaches of Cancun or Maui should never be overlooked. Those who invest in family vacations will come home with sand in their shoes and a new outlook on life.

Finally, in conclusion, may I say a few words to the brethren? You are doing a wonderful job and we appreciate you so much. Do your home teaching, watch an occasional sporting event on TV and look for opportunities to talk with anyone who will listen about all the things you know. People appreciate that and look forward to your insight.

I won’t write an ending. I think that part should come from the heart. I can think of scriptures to insert into this talk but I feel those things can be best added by the general authorities themselves. I’ve noticed that the LDS general authorities really know their stuff and I’m sure the other ones do too, even though they are never allowed to speak in general conference.

Watch this fall with me and see if any of my ideas or themes are picked up. In the meantime, go do some service and make someone happy – but don’t forget to buy pizza on the way home and to buy enough that you can share with the royal generation. They’ll be hungry after they finish mowing the lawn. What a glorious fall it will be.

Making the paper

The Deseret News told me that they are going to give me a regular column in print. It will run everyother week but they'd like me to submit something every week even though some of those posts will probably just go on line. This is a very good think. I think I'm going to put a link to my blog in my next column, so if all of you would please clean up the place, that would be nice. I'm hoping we'll get company.

I just wrote one today about the movie "Inception" and dreams. I don't think that will be the one they run tomorrow, for two reasons. I haven't actually sent it to them and I'm hoping they'll run my Christmas miracle column.

It looks like I'm going to have a regular column in the Deseret News. They haven't decided where they'll put it but it will probably be online. They ran my first one on Nov. 23 and it drew more than 5,000 hits. This is a good thing. I'm hoping I can move to Maui by my wife's birthday in February. I'll need to get famous, however, to do so. I'm doing the blogging, facebook and twitter stuff in hopes of getting people to go to the story and click on it. I just need to save up enough money right now so that I can go to Maui. Here's a link to the website: http://bit.ly/g7TIuV.

Have a happy Thanksgiving and stuff.

Business Week

Is there anyone still out there?

If so, I'd like to encourage you to follow the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business blog. We are blogging about Business Week this week and for those of you who have been searching for a blog about Business Week, this is the one you should read. We have lots of bloggers who are wicked excited and they use exclamation points and all sorts of stuff. I hope you have time to check it ou.

It’s possible I’m having some trouble with the concept of blogging in that I’m guessing that if you have a blog, you should actually blog. I have some good excuses for my lack of updates.

I have this thing called a job. They want me to work everyday, everyday and everyday. Sometimes my head hurts and – guess what – they still want me to work.

Since I blogged last my world has been filled with two giant projects. Like Rush Limbaugh at a poetry reading, I’ve had trouble ignoring these projects and pretending I’m having a normal life.

The first thing I’ve been trying to do is “kill the beast.” I am supposed to write and edit a grown-up magazine I call “the beast.” I call it the beast because it stalks me, makes my life a living nightmare and never is completely finished. Just when I think it is done, someone comes by with new ideas to improve it. This is all complicated by the fact that I have to do humorless writing in the beast that includes sentences with subjects and verbs and commas in the right places.

The other night I dreamt that 95 percent of the students and faculty at USU had turned into flesh-eating zombies. While I was a little concerned about the prospect of having someone attack me while walking across campus, I was mostly peeved that I’d have to rearrange the magazine again to make room for a story about the zombie outbreak. I was also afraid of offending the administrators and alumni who were already zombies.

And that’s just what my life has been like if I can sleep.

The other big development is that Stephen Covey has come into my life. He didn’t come in the form of new insights from one of his many books, as he always has in the past. He accepted our invitation to become a professor at the Huntsman School of Business, which was a big deal that required a big announcement. Whenever PR people do a big announcement, they create all these materials and then send them around to each other making changes in them until minutes before the big event begins. We prepare large press packets, chock full of approved verbiage, for the press and feel quite good about ourselves if they don’t throw them away before they leave the event.

I also got a chance to interview Dr. Covey in his home, which to me was a wondrous and frightening thing. It turns out he has a real life with nine kids and 51 grandchildren and he loves them way more than anything else. He’s all centered on the right things, which means that he has no problem meeting presidents and all sorts of important people who, it turns out, all want to meet him.

I managed to spend an hour and a half with him at his home and afterward he still wanted to be associated with our business school.

Excuse me, do I get any credit for acting like a grownup for so long? No.

A little bit of me leaked out during the encounter. I told him the story of me trying to take credit for the name of his famous book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I have said that back in the olden days when I was at BYU and he was my professor, he came to me with the proposed name of a book, Two Things You Should Never Do. I have tried to convince some people on his staff that I was the one who gently suggested that he call his book, instead, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Dr. Covey laughed at my alternative universe story, which is a good thing.

Dr. Covey has quite the sense of humor and a laugh that is truly infectious. He’s also a practical joker. I’ve put some stories about this side of him in my magazine but they may not be in there when the magazine is eventually printed. Magazines like this have to be reviewed, filtered and analyzed by a lot of people. Humor just sort of leaks out in the process like a cup with a hole in it on the side that sprays your shirt without you noticing it. Not that that has ever happened to me.

The remarkable thing about all of this is that while I did this I continued to push ahead in my Biggest Loser contest and when it finally came to an end last week I was still not the biggest loser at USU. I took second place overall. I have lost 34.4 pounds. For those of you unfamiliar with weight loss, 34.4 pounds is past 30 pounds and 30 pounds is the average weight of what I used to eat on a Friday night. I have been trying to lose 30 pounds since I was two months old and learned, through the use of colorful charts my parents held over my broken bed, that I was overweight.

I’m going to keep losing weight until I am no longer a fat guy and then I’m going to continue until I become a small tiny guy, like a plastic army-man guy and I’m going to go on Jay Leno or get a part in “Toy Story V.” I’m also going to kill the beast and, I suspect, I will soon become best friends with Dr. Covey. I have offered to let him use my office and the hope that he’ll take me up on the offer has given me a new reason to come to work.

I’d get all tired and discouraged and he’d say, “Be proactive!” and “Synergize!” and I would and we’d become such good friends.

(Cut to scene with Dr. Stephen Covey and Not-Doctor Steve Eaton running down the beach, laughing, in slow motion. A huge wave hits and my small plastic body washes away as my tiny voice screams out, “Save me! Save me!” And of course he does just seconds before the staggering zombies arrive and …)

Okay, okay, I’m still dreaming. Laugh if you must but when you see the international best-seller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Beast Killers in your local bookstore; look for my picture on the cover. I’ll be the tiny one in green and the only one holding a plastic rifle.

I'm not the biggest loser on campus

Note to readers: I have some good news and bad news for those of you who used to read my columns. The bad news is that when you write a blog, it turns out, there are no limits on the length of the column you write. These columns could be longer than what you are used to. The good news is that they won’t be going through an editor, which means there will be more typos in them than usual. I know how much we all enjoy finding typos in published material.

I am not the Biggest Loser on USU campus. There are a number of people who would argue with that statement but they shouldn’t waste their breath. I can prove them wrong.

Just over two weeks ago I entered USU’s Biggest Loser contest. It’s exactly like the one on TV except that you win free socks instead of $250,000 and at the end of the contest you don’t get to rip up a giant picture of you when you were fat. Actually, there are more differences.

This one is run by wise, skinny, healthy people who believe that you should not lose more than two pounds a week and that you should make “lifestyle changes,” which is code for, “No more eating out of buckets.” And they do have some nice prizes like free meals on campus if you don't say the word mayonnaise and stuff like that that nice people have donated to help us out.

Last Thursday they announced our rankings after the first week and I was in second place, which means that I lost some weight and did what they told me to do. You get more points for being obedient than you do for losing weight.

We have classes where imported wise healthy people talk very slow to us, trying to help us understand that food that tastes good is bad and that weight lifting must be slow and painful if it is to be done correctly. We all know these things but we take careful notes and do our best because we want to be skinny people too.

I have thought of challenging them on key things they teach us that just don’t make sense but when you weigh roughly the same as a Volkswagen bug, it’s hard to effectively win such an argument.

I now have a nutritionist who is helping me change my ways. She is the most amazing listener that I have ever met and very good at her job. She has, however, lost touch with some of the basic joys of life.

For example, here was something that was a part of her PowerPoint presentation one night. I’ll test you with it. She put a picture of an advertisement on the screen. A pizza place was offering a large pizza, four cookies, bread sticks and two litters of Pepsi for $14.99.

Quick. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Of course, it’s a good thing. It’s a joyous thing. Turns out, she said it is an evil thing, in fact it is a package deal full of evil. She was so outraged by it that I think she wanted us to storm the pizza place to demand the ad be rescinded. I finally asked her to remove the visual aid, a request she probably interpreted as evidence that we could no longer bear to see such advertising filth. I didn’t look around but I’m guessing there were other members of the group trembling, clutching their little water bottles and crying just like me.

The most difficult change of all the things she has asked me to do is to no longer eat while I’m watching TV or reading the newspaper. This is a change that just feels unbelievably wrong. I feel like a Republican at a soup kitchen or a Democrat on a budget. I’m grumpy. When I’m eating, sometimes I just start talking to family members who are around, which upsets and confuses them, driving them from the room. And other times I’m forced to just sit and think while I eat. I think about important things like, what would happen if the characters from Lost suddenly came across the characters from Gilligan’s Island?

I paid to be a part of this program and they have connected me with a trainer who makes me do the strangest, most humiliating, painful exercises I have ever done. I like him, in part, because I think he time traveled from the 60’s and has long hair and a beard. He also laughs a lot, encourages me and never calls me names. I do fear the laughing part may be sparked by the fact that it seems likely many of the exercises he has me do are only for the entertainment of the other trainers in the gym. For example, there’s one he calls the “fire hydrant” and I don’t think I’m the fire hydrant in the drill.

They also had us work out once with the Army ROTC guys. They were surprisingly kind for military types and they never shouted at us or made us do push ups while they were spraying us with a hose. We worked out at an indoor track and I was concerned that people would think that the Army was so hard-up for recruits that we had all been accepted into the program. I mentioned this to one of them and he said, “We’d be proud to have you in the Army.”

Wasn’t that nice?

I found out that these guys work hard in college exercising, studying and stuff only to graduate and go overseas into life-threatening, scary situations. It made me want there to be fewer life-threatening, scary situations in the world.

They invited us to work out with them every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. and I have several times planned to go but, it turns out, 6 a.m. is very early in the morning. My hope was that I could go, work hard and earn their trust and then teach them things that would help them. For example, they do lots of exercises that are very painful and when they count, they count wrong. For example, four push ups equals just one push up. This was a problem I picked up on right away because my push up count, which is not high, was even worse in the military world.

I woke up this morning with a number firmly fixed in my head: 12.6. When you haven’t stayed on a diet for more than two hours or consistently lost weight in years and suddenly you start making progress, you become quite fixated on the amount of weight you have lost. Today if someone asks me my name there’s a very real possibility I’ll say that I’m, “12.6.”

Today I’m at the 12.6-pound mark. This is something I can’t stop myself from telling people. I can work it into any conversation and I know I should just keep it to myself because people look at me like I’m a Volkswagen that thinks it is a Porsche because it lost a hubcap. It’s not much but I’ve noticed that my shirts don’t rip if I laugh and the car has stopped scraping the pavement when I turn to the left.

I’ll try not to make my blog about the weight loss thing all the time but sometimes there are victories I have to share and my understanding is that blogs are for people who want to pretend they are sharing with others. That’s me. Today I want to share the fact that I’m not the Biggest Loser on the USU campus, but I hope that soon I will be.