GuruStump.com

The Biggest Mistake Made by Single Mormons Results (part 1 of 2)

September 6th, 2009

Thanks, everyone, for participating in the survey. I have gone through your answers and tried to categorize them. I’m afraid this has been an unscientific and subjective process, but I think the list of most popular responses I’ve produced is generally accurate. Considering how many responses were given and how long the article was getting to write about them, I have created a top 10 list. This article will cover items 10-6 in the list, and 5-1 will come in a follow up. If you’re interested to read about the original survey or to see the actual questions, go here. And now, without further ado: to the results!

Demographics

There were 88 respondents to the survey, with women, singles, and church members easily outnumbering males, married people, and non-members respectively. Here’s the chart:

The most interesting notable here, I think, is that women seemed so much more prone to answer a survey about what singles are doing wrong than men were. Whereas this phenomenon could be explained in numerous ways, I suspect it may have to do with the fact that women feel more powerless to control whether they get married. The cultural norm where men do the asking means that women just have to wait and hope. As a result, when given an opportunity to voice an opinion and perhaps effect changes in how people meet each other and pair off, it would stand to reason that women would be more likely to chime in. This might seem like the only way they can tell men in general what they need. More on that later. For now, let’s see what everyone had to say.

Top 10 Responses: Numbers 10 Through 6

And now what you’ve all been waiting for: direct from your peers, a list of the top ten things single Mormons are doing wrong.

10. Unclear Signals

8% of the respondents complained that Mormon singles are guilty of putting out unclear signals. The general opinion seems to be that this is a problem more for women, as 88% of these respondents attributed it to them. One single woman described it as “Saying yes when we mean no. Some women were raised with the notion that you cannot say no to a guy who asks you out. Women need to say no if they’re going to complain about it and stand the guy up later.” A single male seemed to echo her notion when he described it as “Saying words in between Yes and No.” Dating can be a bit of a minefield. These respondents seemed to want as clear a map as possible to navigate through it without embarrassing or badly hurting themselves.

On the other hand, some respondents saw dating as more of a treasure hunt than a mine field. They were less concerned about stepping on traps than they were about finding the gold. In any case, they still wanted clear instructions to find their way. One single male described it like this: “Not being direct with men- if they like a guy, they tend to play games. Flirt a little. Give them clear signals. It’s o.k.” A single woman said “Maybe it’s not being able to effectively communicate that they want to be asked out on dates. Maybe they need more tips like knowing when to touch a guy on the arm to signal interest, stuff like that.” Another single woman noted “I was never a very good flirt. I actually don’t know how to flirt and I don’t like playing games. I’ve discovered that all my married female friends seem to have this ability in spades.” I don’t know if she saw this as a deficiency for her or any other woman, but she had noticed that the women who had managed to marry seemed much better at flirting.  Read more...

Posted in Love and Sex, Philosophy, Religion | 3 Comments »

The Biggest Mistake Made by Single Mormons Poll

August 13th, 2009

I’m getting close to the point where I tally the results of this survey. If you haven’t responded yet but want to be included, now’s the time. If you don’t want to read the explanation, you can just click here and go straight to the poll:

Take the Poll

Single Mormons seem to spend a lot of time and energy thinking about how single they are, especially as they try to devise a way to stop being single. I’m one of them, and this problem is a central preoccupation of mine.

Now that I’m getting older, though, and interacting with more people who are already married or have previously been married, I’m finding different attitudes. It seems that every time a single person complains about their singleness, there’s a married person nearby waiting to tell them that being married isn’t all that great. Mormons tend to say something like “it’s a lot of hard work.” If you translate this out of “politically-correct” and into “English” it comes out as “it sucks.”

So I’m finding myself surrounded by people who either want to get married, or long for the days when they were blissfully single. Given that I still belong to the former group, I romantically cling to the notion that “hard work” doesn’t necessarily “suck,” and that there is happiness to be had in marriage. However, given that so many around me seem unable to get at this happiness (myself included), I have to conclude that we’re doing something wrong.

I have some notions about what the wrong is that we’re doing, but I am curious to have some alternative points of view. So I have decided to conduct a poll. I’m hosting the poll on a site called surveymonkey.com. Anyone who wants can respond to it, and all respondents will remain anonymous.

There are only five questions on the poll: the first three just ask your sex, marital status, and whether you are LDS. The other two questions are: “what is the biggest mistake made by single Mormon men?” and “what is the biggest mistake made by single Mormon women?”

I’ve left the last two questions very broad because I imagine some people will want to respond more in terms of the mistakes we make that keep us single, while others will want to talk about the mistakes we make that mess up our eventual marriages.

Whatever your angle, please click on the link below to take the poll. Feel free to be as brief, wordy, insightful, superficial, funny, or grave as you like. The poll will accept 100 respondents. When that number is hit (or when I realize that no one is ever going to take my stupid poll and just give up waiting), I’ll collect the results and publish a summary of them on this blog. I’ll try to include the most entertaining snippets from your answers and point out any interesting trends that I find.
So what are you waiting for?

Take the Poll

Posted in Love and Sex, Religion | 5 Comments »

Love, Lust, and Carbon Monoxide

July 31st, 2009

Sweet: Glam Rockers and Biochemists

In 1978, a glam rock band from Great Britain called Sweet was on their way to musical obscurity. The era of musicians in sparkling tight pants, pink scarves and blaze orange platform boots was coming to an end thanks to this new thing called “Punk.” But Sweet had one last hit percolating in their minds. When they released their new single, “Love Is Like Oxygen” shot up the charts in both the US and UK.

From looking at them or paying close attention to their lyrics, you might not get the impression that Sweet were brilliant philosophers or accomplished biochemists. Nevertheless, this Love Is Like Oxygen notion of theirs has some legs. The idea that everyone needs love seems to be pretty well accepted. In child development circles especially, they seem to believe that human beings need love just to survive, much less to be happy.

But then, that’s not the kind of love I’m interested in ranting about. I was born to loving parents who would do anything for me and for whom I would do anything. I share the same sort of love with my brother, and with a small cadre of very close friends. So I’m covered on that kind of love. However, there is this other kind of love that I don’t know that I need, but certainly want. I’m going to call it romantic love. I can’t say that anyone needs it, per se. I’ve never had it, and yet I’ve managed to survive for 34 years. Nevertheless, I can say that I want it really bad, to the point that it does sometimes feel like I’ve been holding my breath for three and a half decades.

And that brings me to carbon monoxide poisoning. Every cell in your body needs oxygen to stay alive. The mitochondria in the cells require oxygen to produce ATP, which is the chemical energy source used by the cells to carry out the rest of its life processes. Oxygen is transported to each cell through your respiratory and circulatory systems. You breathe it into your lungs, where individual O2 molecules (that’s two oxygen atoms bonded together) bind with a molecule in your red blood cells called hemoglobin. These red blood cells are then pumped out to the body in your bloodstream to drop off the oxygen molecules to the rest of your cells.

The problem is that carbon monoxide (an oxygen and carbon atom bound together, or CO) can take the place of the oxygen in the red blood cell (in fact, it’s 200 times more likely to attach to a hemoglobin molecule than an oxygen molecule is, so where both are present, the CO is most likely to get the spot). So when you get a bunch of carbon monoxide in your lungs, the CO binds to the hemoglobin in your red blood cells in place of the oxygen, and is transported to your cells throughout the body. When it gets to the cells, it turns out to be useless. It can’t even be dislodged from the red blood cell, much less used to make ATP. So the more CO you breathe in, the more you increases the CO level in your bloodstream, and the less oxygen is able to get to your cells.

In the diagram below, George Clooney represents oxygen, and Pee Wee Herman represents carbon monoxide in the lungs. As you can see, although the Georges easily outnumber the Pee Wees, it is Pee Wee that manages to fill most all of the available link-up points on the hemoglobin molecules.  Read more...

Posted in Love and Sex, Philosophy, Religion | No Comments »

GuruStump.com update

December 8th, 2008

My personal website has once again been updated. For the past several months I have been working for a web development and marketing company called Threshold Interactive. We have recently released a few of the big websites that I helped build. I’ve put up links to them on my own portfolio site at gurustump.com. The clients are actually big companies you have heard of: Sony Pictures Television International and Honda Powersports. The sites are beautiful, too, so I highly encourage you to go check them out.

Beyond that, another web site which I had a substantial part in building (but that was done outside of Threshold) is now up and live. It’s for a toy company called Mighty World. You can get to it from my website as well.

Posted in Stuff that Happened, Technology | No Comments »

Scripturecast.net: providing a little help getting your reading done

April 6th, 2008

Inspired by General Conference weekend, I’m throwing up a little posting that could be useful to all my LDS friends. Many of you may now be resolving to try to improve your study of the scriptures, but you may find the prospect daunting in that you haven’t been able to devise a system that gets you to make your study a habitual, daily thing.

I’ve found a wonderful online service at a website called Scripturecast.net. Effectively what scripturecast does is to permit you to customize a daily RSS feed that tells you what you should be reading every day, according to the parameters you set. For example, if you want to read the Book of Mormon by July 1st of this year, Scripturecast will automatically divide the book into equal segements. Every day, it will add a new piece to your RSS feed, so you know how much you should read that day. You can access your RSS feed through iTunes or any RSS capable software that you may have on your machine.

If you prefer to set up your schedule with a certain amount of reading per day rather than with a target completion date, Scripturecast has your back there too. You can set it to schedule you to read anything from a chapter (or section) per month to several chapters per day. It’s really all up to you and your personal needs.

That’s not all. Scripturecast will create an HTML page for you (just in case you don’t do the RSS thing so much), where your reading schedule will automatically update every day. It will even provide a link to the chapters or sections you are to read each day so you can go straight to the page on lds.org and read them off the screen. There is even an audio player embedded in the Scripturecast page, so you can simply click it, and have your computer read your scheduled verses to you (once again borrowing from the audiobooks files housed at lds.org).

So if you want to make scripture reading a regular part of your daily schedule, maybe Scripturecast is the trick for you. Scripturecast currently only schedules reading in the Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, and the most recently posted LDS General Conference (so right now they have the October 2007 addresses up), and I don’t know if there are any plans to add the Bible or Pearl of Great Price to the lineup. Nevertheless, I’ve found it to be a very valuable tool in my personal study, and hope it can be useful for you as well.

Posted in Religion, Reviews and Recommendations | No Comments »